Co-author: Thierry deBaillon – @tdebaillon

Simplicity and the Enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward.  With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Complication: the industrial disease

As organizations grow, the original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Current management wisdom – based on Robin Dunbar’s research; the size of military units through history; and the work of management experts such as Tom Peters – considers the ideal size of an organization to be around 150 people. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop above 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place. This is what management schools have been doing for over half a century.  To ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, the core competencies of decision-making and innovation are moved to the periphery. The company’s vision, if there is one, is now supported at the board level but not the individual level. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of  growth. At some stage of complication, companies do not even create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that large organizations have a tendency to destroy internal jobs: by transferring jobs to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors. Large firms barely participate in job creation. Similar studies conducted in other countries show the same results. However, knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Many organizations today are also facing significant demographic challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are retiring, while Generation Y wants to communicate and interact in a completely different manner. There may be four generations in the modern workplace and each has its unique traits and demands. There is growing complexity both inside and outside the organization.

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding, as well as some existing, but minor, efficiency improvements in tweaking the old system, are the major barriers to adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices. Companies need to get a clearer view of the competitive advantages of Enterprise 2.0 before an organizational framework like wirearchy can co-exist with hierarchical structures and thinking.

Wirearchy: a dynamic two-flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by people and technology.

Here are some key organizational changes during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Let’s look at how social learning can support emergent practices in the enterprise:

Implementing Social Learning

Knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. In a globally networked economy, based increasingly on intangible goods and services, constant innovation is necessary to stand out. Markets such as software, financial services, consulting and consumer goods have to continuously adapt their offers to keep up with changing demands and advances in technology.

Hyper-linked knowledge flows have made organizational walls permeable. Official channels are competing with an expanding number of informal communications. A collaborative enterprise is becoming  the optimal organization for such a networked economy, capitalizing on these expanding knowledge flows. To innovate, organizations need to collaborate internally and this is social. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

In complex environments, learning is much more than just a matter of structured knowledge acquisition. However, that is all that training enables. Corporate training methods often consist of delivering content and perhaps providing drill and practice sometime prior to doing the task. There is often a gap between training and doing. Training alone cannot address the wide variety of informal learning needs of workers. Nor can it help to transfer the tacit knowledge on which many of us depend to do our jobs.

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done.  Regularly publishing to our networks is how we can stay connected. Here is an approach to embed social learning into organization work flows. This is an iterative process that can be adapted to fit the context.

Listen & Create: Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse: Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create: Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

Enterprise social learning

Social learning consultant Jane Hart has created a comprehensive, and growing, list of social learning examples in the workplace. Companies listed here include British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, NASA, Nationwide Insurance, and SFR. The SFR case study, reported by Sue Weakes, shows how a younger workforce is demanding better access to social media.

French mobile phone company SFR implemented ActiveNetworker from Jobpartners to support its new social network. My SFR comprises a company blog, a central space for discussion, and the ability to build profiles that allow employees to share information on career progress, learning and development and aspirations. They can also join groups of interest … ActiveNetworker has been well received and SFR is averaging 80,000 visits per week from the 10,000 employees that are using it.

Dave Wilkins at Learn.com, describes the case at ACE Hardware in which the company set up a web-based social learning platform for its 4,600 independent hardware dealers to share and seek advice. They were able to look for new sales leads, find rarely used items through the community and share merchandising display strategies. This social learning community strategy resulted in a 500% return on investment in just six months.

Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard, a software and IT services company, was recently interviewed in the New York Times. He discussed how he has flattened the company’s hierarchy as a way of dealing with the globalization of the company. One important social communication tool at SunGard is Yammer, a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter but used internally. NYT: “What kind of things do you write on Yammer?”

I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The Ford Motor Company has used social media for learning, beginning with SyncMyRide, and now integrating it as a way to connect customers and the company.

Ford’s intention is to consider how social media can inform the company as a whole, rather than judging its efforts by the criteria of one department and those “holistic” lessons filter up and down through the company, says Monty [head of social media]y. That includes the company’s executive board and goes as far as putting up senior execs for online Q&As through Twitter and on the corporate Facebook page. “There is a healthy respect for [social media] and how we participate in it. Two-way dialogue is healthy for a company like Ford, and we’ve grown as a result of having participated in it,” says Farley [Chief Communications Officer]. At some point, as executives grow in seniority, they tend to become “isolated from reality,” adds Monty. Making the Ford board aware of and engaged with social conversations counters that isolation. “When [CEO Alan Mulally] says we are making the cars people want, well, how do we know unless we are listening?” asks Monty.

A business imperative

Deloitte’s Shift Index of 2009 highlights the challenges facing several industries today, that of declining return on assets and the need for innovation. One recommendation is to enable knowledge flows, a key benefit of social learning:

Given the growing importance of knowledge flows, perhaps the most powerful form of innovation in this context may be institutional innovation –re-thinking roles and relationships across institutions to better enable them to create and participate in knowledge flows.

One of the great things about web social media is that they are for the most part free. Experimentation does not require an enterprise-wide software deployment strategy at the onset. As Seth Godin, marketing and branding expert, says:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the latest research in great detail in the book, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives (Little-Brown, 2009). Robin Hanson shows that we seldom change our behaviour based solely on getting new information. “People don’t believe something works until they’ve seen it work in something pretty close to their situation. A media story about something far away just doesn’t say much.” Again, social learning is about getting things done in networks.

Getting started

According to Rebecca Ferguson at The Open University, social learning can take place when people:

• clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing
• ground their learning – by defining their question or problem
• engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

Following the process explained earlier:

Listen: The first step in social learning is paying attention and watching what others are doing. Finding trusted sources of information is very important. Hearing what others are doing and connecting to them with social media such as Twitter or blogs increases the chances of accidental and serendipitous learning. For example, one can follow conversations on Twitter by searching for “hashtags”. Typing “#PKM” shows current conversations on personal knowledge management.

Converse: By engaging in conversations and providing valuable information to others one becomes part of professional networks. Many experts are willing to help those new to the field but newcomers first must say what they don’t know.

Co-create: Over time one can engage more in co-operative activities, such as adding comments to a blog post or extending the thought in an article or discussion thread. For many people used to traditional work, working transparently in the open takes some time to get to used to.

Formalize & Share: Writing professional journals or lessons learnt can ingrain the important process of formalizing aspects of social learning. Sharing with others, internally or externally, over time becomes part of a normal daily work flow.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our organizational structures. According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

• Rigid protocols are counter-productive
• There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
• We cannot separate parts from the whole
• Success is not a fixed address

This is the basis of the evolving social organization.

Some additional thoughts on social learning

Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at ASTD 2009 (video):

Mike McDermott (T Rowe Price): “I think the impact of social learning will dramatically increase in the future, in a number of ways, both internally with our associates and externally with our clients.”

Karie Willyerd (Sun Microsystems): “we see the death of newspapers … the same thing is going to happen with learning functions and training materials … if we don’t learn how to publish with social media … through social learning.”

Walt McFarland (Booz Allen Hamilton): “The environment is going to demand it [social learning]. The problems are just tougher and they’re too big for any one consultant or any consulting team”

Dave Pollard on bridging generational differences in the workplace:

Our job, as people who appreciate the value and perspective of both generations, and value diversity, is what Nancy White calls “building bridges” — translating Gen Y’s ideas and requests into language “the man” can understand (value creation and ROI), and translating the boss’ and IT’s restrictions into language that Gen Y’ers can understand (the risk of catastrophic financial loss, loss of business reputation, and insolvency). The best way to build these bridges is by telling stories — of history, of unexpected and astonishing success, and of unintended consequences.

Tony Karrer on measurement:

What’s interesting to me is that with eLearning 2.0 or social learning or more specifically with using social tools to do things like have interesting conversations – what I want to measure is really not at all what is learned. I want to measure whether the results produced are better. I am not sure I know what they should have learned at all.

We may think we should adopt best practices, but to be really effective and innovative we need to practice to be best.

First, we have to do the hard thinking  about how to do things better. Jay Deragon talks about how important it is to think about what we do and not just emulate others:

Social Doo Doo’s are those that practice and copy, what others do expecting to get the same or better results. Social Doo Doo’s are a dime a dozen and the market seems to think hiring the Doo Doo’s will help their business do something different. Doing something different and getting more than you’ve gotten in the past  requires you to know how to think which isn’t what others are doing.

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

Another example of advancing practice in a field is provided in The New Yorker’s The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are? In this article, a doctor explains how radically new thinking saved the life of a fire fighter but his mates refused to try something different and they perished.

As Berwick explained, the organization had unravelled. The men had lost their ability to think coherently, to act together, to recognize that a lifesaving idea might be possible. This is what happens to all flawed organizations in a disaster, and, he argued, that’s what is happening in modern health care. To fix medicine, Berwick maintained, we need to do two things: measure ourselves and be more open about what we are doing. This meant routinely comparing the performance of doctors and hospitals, looking at everything from complication rates to how often a drug ordered for a patient is delivered correctly and on time. And, he insisted, hospitals should give patients total access to the information. “ ‘No secrets’ is the new rule in my escape fire,” he said. He argued that openness would drive improvement, if simply through embarrassment. It would make it clear that the well-being and convenience of patients, not doctors, were paramount. It would also serve a fundamental moral good, because people should be able to learn about anything that affects their lives.

Imitating what others do is not the way to make progress, or as Marshall McLuhan said,  “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Individuals and organizations need to chart their own courses but “Best Practice” thinking is still widespread.  I have found that decision-makers in organizations can be too lazy to extrapolate and figure out how to apply practices in their own context. They want easy, clear answers and hence have the tendency to hire cookie-cutter solutions from big name consultancies. But there are no easy answers. As my colleague Jon Husband says of his wirearchy framework, it enables the mass customization of business, and that is what we need to replace best practices. Individuals and organizations continuously practicing to be best, on a large scale.

No technology or process improvement will save an unraveling industry or organization. What is needed is better thinking and learning while practicing to be the best. This starts with transparency in sharing our knowledge and doing our work.

Formal training just won’t cut it any more as the primary means by which we prepare and adapt in order to get work done. Training isn’t dead, it’s just not enough, and cannot be the only tool in the box.

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As Jay Cross stated in a recent interview:

Formal learning can be somewhat effective when things don’t change much and the world is predictable …

Today’s world is the opposite in every way imaginable …

Things are changing amazingly fast …

There’s so much to learn …

Today’s work is all about dealing with novel situations …

This image, from Cynthia Kurtz’s post, Confluence, clearly shows the challenge we face in our networked organizations competing and collaborating in complex adaptive systems.

The challenge is getting organizations that are used to dealing with the Known & Knowable to be able to manage in Complex environments and even Chaotic ones from time to time. As can be seen in Kurtz’s graphic, that means weaker central control which is, of course, scary for traditional management. This is not a training problem but rather a management issue. How can you be less directive and enable distributed work, and therefore distributed (and undirected) learning? Actually there are historical examples, including guerrilla groups; religious movements; and social organizations. We need to look back as well as into the future. There are lessons and examples that can help us once we cast off some of our industrial management assumptions.

Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) inform many of our current practices but there are other models and frameworks available. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and our current models are inadequate. This is a conversation that all business managers and organizational leaders need to have. We should be ready to have many informed conversations about managing in complexity and put forward some plausible options. For further reading:

General framework: Wirearchy

Background & Models: Gary Hamel: Future of Management; Thomas Malone: The Future of Work; Andrew McAfee: Enterprise 2.0

Ideas & Methods: Working Smarter Fieldbook; State of Learning in the Workplace

More conversations: The Smart Work Company; Internet Time Alliance blog;

Survey results from a 2009 Chief Learning Officer survey showed that 77% of respondents felt that people in their organization were not growing fast enough to keep up with the business. And what have the learning and development (L&D) specialists been doing about it? Not much it seems. Donald Clark reports that decision-makers at UK organizations feel that:

• 55% claim L&D failing to deliver necessary training
• 46% doubt L&D can deliver
• less than 18% agree that L&D aligned with business

But let’s not blame just L&D. Human Resources (HR) seem to be out of sync with organizational needs as well, nicely summed up in a recent FastCompany article:

I think successful organizations are very rigorous and creative about getting profitable work from their employees, their managers, and their business units. The problem is, those organizations don’t expect as much from HR, hence HR is usually not overseen, not measured, and not judged for its performance. It’s the department no one wants to be responsible for. It’s the department that is not subjected to outcomes analysis.

But the real culprit is management and that’s what needs to change. Steve Denning blames the Harvard Business School mindset for holding back organizational progress and goes on to explain how senior management kills innovation in many areas, including knowledge management:

So even when an oasis of excellence and innovation is established within an organization being run on traditional management lines, the experience doesn’t take root and replicate throughout the organization because the setting isn’t congenial. The fundamental assumptions, attitudes and values are at odds with those of traditional management.

I’m seeing that all of our initiatives for increased knowledge-sharing; communities of practice; social business;  or networked learning are rather futile unless management itself changes. The real chasm at work is between the C-suite and the K-workers. I’m not sure how to change this, but the focus (or in German: schwerpunkt) has be on three things: management, management & management. Anything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Over three years ago I wrote that the future of learning is DIY:

With Google you can find most information that you need. YouTube is a quick and easy way to get “learning objects” to the world. Apple gives the essential tools for knowledge workers, and in a nice package. Wikipedia has shown that the wisdom of crowds is just as good as the wisdom of elites. Starbucks gives free-agents and road warriors a place to meet and work. These top brands provide the equivalent of the interstate highway system for the creative age.

Enabling DIY (do-it-yourself) on the Web appears to be a good business model. Even on the fringes, such as wi-fi from a café. This is the power of informal learning, if organisations decide to enable it. It has to be DIY, user-driven and uncontrolled. People will figure out what’s best for them, as they have for millennia.

Has anything changed?

There seem to be more DIY platforms today and they are being used, though the business models are not yet clear. Facebook has enabled DIY ridiculously easy group forming, but it comes with a price on privacy. Ning was wildly popular as a DIY online community builder, but that business model did not seem to work. Open source Elgg may replace Ning with a non locked-in platform, but its success remains to be seen.

For mass DIY, ease of use is the trump card. Just look at Google Docs, the best and easiest DIY online collaboration suite, in my opinion. I remember using Writely (sold to create Google Docs) and it had a better user interface in my opinion, but was only used by digital savvy folks. Google dumbed-down the interface and functions and that ease of use, plus growing demand, made Google Docs a market leader. Timing is everything.

Now that many people have used DIY tools for their online work and play, I can’t see the trend being reversed any time soon. Enabling DIY should be a prime directive in the development of technologies for collaborative work and networked learning as well. Please pass this on to those folks in e-learning

Geoffrey Moore’s analogy of “crossing the chasm” is that any new technology is quickly adopted by innovators and early adopters, but there is a chasm to cross in order to get the more pragmatic majority to adopt the new technology. For marketing, this is the real challenge – can the new product get widespread acceptance? In many cases the development costs can only be recovered if the majority purchase the goods or services.

I have referred to this model before and even tied it to Gladwell’s “tipping point” theory. My consulting work is mostly bridging the chasm:

1. I am an early adopter myself, and use this experience to work with the early pragmatic majority. I also use a broader definition of technology; being the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. I spend much of my time watching the innovators, and
2. I then determine which of their ideas and new technologies would make sense for my clients. To do this, I have to keep trying out new tools and processes in my own work.
3. It’s a balancing act, being on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge.

In 2005 I wrote that these technologies were ready to cross the chasm:

• Blogs (with some difficulties) & RSS
• Workflow Learning (including wider acceptance of performance support instead of training)
• Open Source

… and that these probably wouldn’t get across, yet:

• Wikis (partially because of the name)
• Natural Enterprises & Natural Capitalism (unfortunately)

A year later the use of blogs had exploded, while workflow learning had stalled and I noted that an understanding of the value of informal learning was catching on. Wikis were becoming more popular, especially those that replicated word processesors, like Writely, which was later purchased to become Google Docs, used ubiquitously today. There appeared to be a growing interest in natural enterprises and something to replace corporatism as a guiding model, and this continues, though too slowly for me.

In 2010 we’ve seen Twitter and micro-sharing cross the chasm, while virtual worlds, like Second Life seem to be floundering. Informal learning is being discussed throughout the profession, but in many cases it’s just lipstick on a pig. Mobile tools are poised for a major breakthrough, though more as performance support and knowledge management than courses online. In the next few years, the use of collaborative work technologies, such as Google Docs or Sharepoint, will grow, while stand-alone learning applications will see a decline.

I think the next big shift in training/elearning will be the integration of learning into work. As staff costs continue to increase and the economy sputters for several more years, companies will look for reductions that also improve effectiveness. Once companies pass on the word that their staff are learning without a training department the shift will happen quickly. Learning professionals won’t even be involved in these conversations. Come back in five years and see if I’m right.

Tony Bates made these recommendations to the University of New Brunswick, “to foster further development of knowledge-based industries in the province”:

1. Greater incorporation of ICT and other 21st century skills (e.g. independent learning, problem solving) in a wider range of programs and subject disciplines.

2. A gradual move from almost entirely face-to-face courses in first year programs to hybrid or fully distance programs in the fourth year undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as develop more online non-credit certificate or diploma programs focused on the lifelong learning market.

3. Start gradually to redesign courses in this way on a program by program basis. Make sure the new programs are properly resourced (time for development + learning technology support).

4. Stop treating distance education courses as extra load, but integrate them into regular credit programming as part of a normal teaching load for instructors, perhaps supplemented with revenues from full cost recovery courses aimed at lifelong learners.

5. Look to partnership and consortia to leverage the development of online programs on an international basis.

6. Provide systematic and comprehensive training in pedagogy and educational technology for instructors scheduled to work on online programs.

7. Provide instructional and web designers to work in teams with instructors for the redesign of courses.

After reading this and seeing what advice they got from the west coast, I just had to dust off a (not successful) online learning strategy proposal that Rob Paterson and I submitted to UNB in 2008. Here are some highlights:

We see the objective of building a community of learners as the critical aspect of any future endeavour in online learning.
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In two years time, 2010, the web will be the principal place where most business, entertainment, and socializing will take place – learning will follow shortly – so by 2012 you will be a player or dead.
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The university can still grant a degree and the degree has a certain amount of societal value. The university can also offer a social space, but most kids don’t need 4 years of this.
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UNB wants to be a leader in online learning but there must be several reasons why the university is not a leader already. There is no competition in New Brunswick and little competition in the Atlantic provinces. One of the reasons for declining enrolment is demographics, as cited in the UNB Online Partnership document, and another is the lack of students outside the traditional age range. This age range is what business ventures call “low hanging fruit” and the model worked well when a university education was accessible, affordable and provided a decent return on investment. Given the rising cost of a university education and the declining perception of a bachelor’s degree, the traditional university business model has peaked.

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I respect Tony very much, but I do not believe that an incremental approach will work. However, it’s probably what the client wants to hear.

Would you rather go to a doctor who is in the band-aid business or the healing business? Prescribing training for all organizational learning is like handing out band-aids without a diagnosis. Training is often a solution in search of a problem.

This becomes evident when ~80% of learning on the job is informal and less than 10% of the knowledge needed for work is in our heads. But how much organizational effort is put into training, above all else? If it’s more than 20% of the learning support budget then it’s probably being misspent. For instance, Peter Senge’s comprehensive research showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old. What is the reason for this? Organizational learning. Basically, individual learning in organizations is irrelevant. Work is almost never done by one person alone. Almost all value is created by teams and networks of people.

Enterprise training and its ADDIE framework are designed to develop individual skills, where the objective is always, “the learner will be able to …” not, “the organization will be able to …”. The basic premise is that any trained human cog will be able to fit into the organizational machine. But knowledge-intensive and creative enterprises don’t work that way. Every node in the networked enterprise is unique but the network itself is even more important. Social learning is how we get things done in networks. This is how nature and complex adaptive systems work – social learning is the best strategy.

We need to understand, encourage and support social learning in the enterprise.

Recently, Jane Hart & Jay Cross created this graphic that shows the five stages of workplace learning.

One limitation of this representation is that the first four stages look bigger than the fifth stage and could be perceived as being more important. Here’s a different perspective on the same theme.

My recent post on the value of the LMS stems from the perspective that the networked enterprise is a new organizational form that needs different support mechanisms.  Siloed support functions are becoming redundant, as are siloed technologies. Unless a platform like an LMS is actually used to get work done, it will become redundant as well. When learning is the work then it has to be integrated with working. That means stand-alone L&D departments (and the stand-alone LMS) are peripheral to 90% of the learning that is happening. The new focus of the training department in the networked enterprise must be on communicating, connecting and collaborating, and that means integrating with the work being done, not using parallel processes and technologies.

This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post that the LMS is no longer the centre of the universe and Jane Hart’s post today on A Transition Path to the Future. According to Jane, Step One in this transition is:

There are, of course, a number of steps on the transition path to a post-LMS future, and one of the first inevitably involves taking a good hard look at how your LMS is performing.  It may be that you want to retain it in some cut-down form, or it may be that it is providing no real value at all, and it is a barrier to “learning” .  I’m not suggesting that in every case, you should junk your LMS completely – in fact that would probably involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater! – but you certainly need to take an honest look at whether it is delivering what you need in the workplace today.

Step Two, or a concurrent step, would be to look at how to enhance collaboration.

First of all, collaborative work tools must be simple to be effective. The real complexity should come out of the emergent work, not the software. A collaboration platform that is over-engineered would be counterproductive. The key aspect of a collaboration platform is that should make work more transparent and rewards sharing. Does your LMS do this? Does it simplify work and make it more transparent for everyone in the network? Does it enhance serendipitous learning?

The options then become:

• Open the LMS so it can be used in the daily workflow
• Connect the LMS to a collaborative work platform
• Migrate learning to a collaboration platform and minimize use of the LMS

Given the nature of many LMS, the last option is the most likely. Once again, it’s about getting work done. If learning is embedded in the work tools, then there is little need to go to a separate place (LMS) to “do some learning”. Here are some examples:

• Use blogs to replace group e-mails so that information can be updated on a given subject/topic. This makes the work transparent and encourages learning.
• Use wikis for all documentation. This reinforces the notion of work in perpetual Beta and encourages business improvement.
• Adopt presence tools (IM, micro-blogging) so you know who is doing what in the organization. Tools like Twitter/Yammer/Laconica also become excellent places to jot down notes in public, which encourages serendipitous learning.

The key challenge is merging work and learning, especially in the minds of workers. I’ve noted before that the main objective of the modern training department should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning professionals within such a collaborative work model is to connect and communicate, based on three core processes:

1. Facilitate collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.
2. Sense patterns and help develop emergent work and learning practices.
3. Work with management to fund and develop better tools and processes for workers.

If your LMS is not helping you with these processes then it’s time to find a better platform.  I recently described one such platform – Elgg: it’s a community effort:

Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual [worker] is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to [does not disrupt work flow]. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.

In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge [knowledge management & social learning]. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.

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* Here is Jane Hart’s follow-up post on Elgg as a collaboration platform.

Some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

@jonathanfields: “The day you say “that SOB stole my idea” is the day you need to face your own inability to execute.” via @moehlert

@barbarosa1: “There are an increasing number of world problems that can’t be solved by hierarchy. Collaboration is the only chance for a solution.” via @sifowler

@timkastelle Nice post from @EskoKilpi: Complexity. The new world between chance and choice

The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity and makes possible new enriching variety in interaction. The changed dynamics we experience every day through social media have the very characteristics of the edge of chaos.

The sciences of complexity change our perspective and thinking. Perhaps, as a result we should, especially in management, focus more attention on what we are doing than what we should be doing. Following the thinking presented by the most advanced scientific researchers, the important question to answer is not what should happen in the future, but what is happening now?

Our focus should be on the communicative interaction creating the continuously developing pattern that is our life.

Outsourcing Journalism: [More evidence that simple work is automated & merely complicated work is outsourced. Be creative or lose your job.] by @RossDawson

Seed.com is considering outsourcing fact-checking and copy-editing – given finding the right talent and quality control systems this should be feasible

When was the last time you worked entirely with people in the same building? Collaboration Is More Important Than Ever by @elsua

I mean, when was the last time you were working with your colleagues in your same building and on the very same project (Just that ONE project!)? Or even in the same country? I bet that was a long while ago! In my own case, the last time I had all of my colleagues in the same building and working on the same project was in 2000. Yes, that far back! From there onwards, people have become a whole lot more distributed, and virtual, to the point where my current team expands globally nowadays across various geographies. And we are all working on a bunch of various different projects / initiatives as well. To us all, like I said, collaboration is not a nice thing to have, but a critical success factor of not only what we do, but who we are as knowledge workers doing Web work day in day out.

If you’re interested in games and social networking (super useful for eLearning and learning) then Games for Social Networks: Notes On The Design and Business of Networked Play is ace from @aquito.  via @BFchirpy

You are not replaceable *because* you share know-how, in fact it gets you places. The fallacy of know-how recipes and hoarding. by @johnt

Chefs share their recipes in books, but will reading one make me a chef. Even when they do demo’s where you can pickup contexual, peripheral and nuances like: what goes with what, acidic’s, timing, seasonal food, temperatures, etc…it still doesn’t mean I can do it, or that I’m a chef. As I said in my recent post, knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, it’s a way of being…Libraries vs Apprenticeship/Storytelling.