#SLCONF 2012–Social Learning in action

Last Thursday I attended the #SLCONF Social Learning Conference in London. It largely practiced what it preached – in that it proved to be a highly social discussion and effective forum for sharing ideas and experiences with an experienced group of professionals and practitioners.

Good use was made of alternative formats and seeding conversation between groups. I think the fact that this was a relatively small group of people (80 odd?) helped ensure that everyone had a voice and an opportunity to contribute.

You can find Martin Couzins review of the event here which covers the key presentations made by Nick Shackleton-Jones (BBC and BP experiences), Tim Drewitt (Eversheds) and Priya Banati and Clare Norman (Accenture). Also Jon Ingham’s audio review of the event.

Ben Betts facilitated a session on Mobile Learning which managed to yield a list of 96 Mobile Learning App Ideas. Not all unique by any stretch, many already covered by existing apps out there, but it demonstrated that there is a real appetite for mobile learning support. There was a subsequent discussion around the difficulties of developing for mobile given the fragmented platforms and software environments, as well as the typical corporate security challenges currently raised by most IT departments. This led to the question of tools that can simplify this process, and Epic’s GoMo Learning platform struck a particular chord, given it’s ability to enable non-technical people to build learning apps – both web and native apps – to all major platforms (Apple iOS, Android, Blackberry) and form factors (smartphone, tablet, whatever next comes along).

Twitter adds value

I was an active user of Twitter to capture key points and contribute my own ideas as they arose from the discussions which I will summarise here. In conferences where this type of immediate social sharing and reflection is welcomed and integrated within the format, then it can add value for all participants and the wider virtual audience. By breaking down the traditional “lecture” format of most conferences, a much more interactive experience is provided for the those present, while offering virtual observers the opportunity to contribute further references and comment that can be fed back into the live event. Indeed, I benefitted immediately as a late train meant I physically missed the first 15 minutes but could contribute straight away with those tweeting and could enter the debate in sync with the room.

So what were my main contributions? Italics indicate some additional explanatory notes:

@shackletonjones talking about #sociallearning and his struggle with understanding what really underpins effective #learning

Emotion is key element #learning RT @bbetts: @shackletonjones I'm a fan of the affective context, check it out http://www.aconventional.com #slconf (Nick is right to focus on the emotional connection to lasting learning impact and memory formation)

70:20:10 model misused and misunderstood. Agree with this.

#informal #learning driven by culture. However technology beginning to influence culture. (Just see the effect of social media on the Arab Spring, marketing/advertising, entertainment and increasingly as the primary medium of social interaction especially amongst young demographics).

@shackletonjones another video you can't live without!youtube.com/watch?v=0d3oc2… (How to peel Garlic in less than 10 seconds) Nick shared a video related to breakfast cereal.

50%+ millennials are contributors not just passive consumers - key difference to productivity generated by #some #sociallearning (what this  means is that we are on the cusp of a big surge in creative productivity that if harnessed appropriately will lead to a huge acceleration in innovation itself but more importantly its real world application and sharing of what works and what doesn’t).

Focus on content generation strategy - need to foster contributors. Go to where the activity already is. Integrate. Seed & excite. (a pithy shorthand for acknowledging the need for some quality content and contribution that will stimulate a wider audience to participate in an authentic and sustained manner).

BP theHub being demo'd - seeded with 800 video clips from across the organisation globally. Works on iPad as well. Good reach. (good example of the Seed & Excite principle).

Unisys found that 3 min leadership videos generated more behaviour change than a 5 day exec training programme. Properly evaluated. (Will now follow this up with Nick for the full case study).

Learning styles brought up and @shackletonjones rightly doesn't believe in it. (that old chestnut came up again…so I promptly clarified…)

Learning PREFERENCES exist but the way we learn most effectively is broadly the same for everyone. The rest is about individual habits, skills, motivation (emotional engagement). (asked the wider HR community for comment)

Thx for retweet see my blog for more http://larsislearning.blogspot.com RT @CaribThompson: #slconf Lars mantra @larshyland "Less learning more often" (A long standing truism which is only getting more and more relevant)

For those interested I mentioned Lynda Gratton book The Shift - how the world of work is changing. (This book demonstrates the forces in the world that are changing the way in which we work, collaborate, communicate – namely the shift to the East, the disintermediation and connectivity of technology which circumvents traditional hierarchical models.)

@mikecollins WARNING social netWORK AHEAD http://bit.ly/zneyoL > quite apt this is published today given the great stuff coming out of #slconf (good contribution from Mike Collins at RBS Insurance injected into the discussion even though he wasn’t physically there.)

Discussed permission and context key to successful mobile learning support - Just in Time, context sensitive and valued content. #mlearning seen as supplementary to other learning support. (There is always a need for a variety of methods delivering interaction over an extended period of time – another of my mantras – Campaign not Course  comes to mind. People liked this at the event.)

Content, Connection, Collaboration, Community - Accenture model for building sharing culture #some #sociallearning (as Ben Betts pointed out “a lot of Cs”)

Accenture case study and book here #slconf

 

In Summary

A good conference which had the courage to allow a less structured conversation to emerge, collectively generating a lot of practical value amongst the participants.

If you also attended, I’d welcome your comments on this post.

The catalyst to accelerated learning and performance

Here's my article just published on Trainingzone, recorded here for your comment.
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Lars Hyland explores how social tools can be harnessed to deliver a more engaging and effective learning experience.

• The experiential divide between using online technology externally and internally within organisations
• Using the crowd to accelerate learning and innovation
• Three ways to begin nurturing self-learning, self-motivated communities

It seems not a second goes by without some form of social media clamouring for our limited attention, whether it is on our desktop or smartphone. The speed at which we have access to the latest news and information is now literally instant (I assume most of you will have by now experienced the spooky nature of Google Instant search, if not give it a try). The irony is that while this may be true for us as internet consumers, in a workplace context the pace and access to available knowledge and tools is often much slower, hidden behind confusing interfaces and bureaucratic barriers. As a result it can lose much of its value when it comes to that crucial moment of application. 

The experiential divide

The learning management system (LMS) can often fall into this trap, struggling to be perceived by its intended audience as valued learning gateway, instead relegating itself to a distributor of tracked learning events, typically compliance related. Clearly this still plays an important role but perhaps, like plumbing, the LMS should be invisible and increasingly vendors do allow more distributed access to the valuable content it holds. However too often users are forced to engage with systems and content that just doesn’t sustain the required motivation to learn and apply as intended.

This experiential divide is beginning to create real tensions, as employees look for and find ways to circumvent sanctioned communication channels. Many of these are social tools (such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin) and the very fact that these are being proactively searched out and used suggests that organisations are missing out on huge productivity benefits.

Crowd Accelerated Learning

A worldwide exemplar of the catalytic effect of social learning is TED (www.ted.com). TED has grown from a fairly exclusive gathering of thinkers, artists and experts sharing their latest thinking in 18-20 minute talks. Under the stewardship of Chris Anderson, TED opened up access to these using online video which has led to vast, self-fuelled growth in participation through an extended network of TEDx events held around the world. This experience has led Anderson to notice a definite acceleration effect in the learning process for those involved – he calls it Crowd Accelerated Learning or Crowd Accelerated Innovation. As more and more people around the world create videos sharing their expertise/skills/latest thinking which in turn is inspiring others to be better. As a result, he reflects on the wider implications this has for education and training:

“We’ve actually got to bring back real creativity and find a way of nurturing that in the education process. In the age of Google the notion of having to cram all these little brains with facts is bonkers. What’s needed is to build skills like how do you stimulate people to ask the right questions? How do you stimulate people to have a meaningful conversation? To think critically? What are the lenses you give people to think about the world?”

These are big questions, and are just as valid to consider within organisations, teams and across your own professional network, as it is on a societal level. Consequently, as learning professionals we need to be mindful of what behaviours social media can catalyse within our own domains of influence, and determine what these mean for how we design learning experiences going forward. A more specific example is Jove (www.jove.com) an online Journal of Visualised Experiments aimed at the scientific community. It uses videos to show in detail the method and results of experiments. This sharing is rapidly accelerating innovation as there is less duplication of effort and the community builds on each others efforts in a healthily collaborative, yet positively competitive basis.

So how can we foster similar virtuous circles within our own communities? Well it would be misleading to say it is easy, especially when working within a corporate culture that may have deep-seated aversions to sharing its knowledge and capabilities in a more open fashion. But here are three suggestions on how and where to begin nurturing self-learning, self-motivated communities.

1)      Start with the new joiner experience

New employees can be catalysts for wider culture change across your organisation. Delivering a social learning experience as a backbone to your onboarding experience can dramatically reduce the time to competence, reinforce best practice behaviours (sidestepping accepted common practice), while allowing new staff to much more rapidly build their professional networks across the organisation. One US insurance company redesigned the onboarding experience for their underwriters which included active participation within an online community across an eight month period, including weekly assignments, online coaching and shared experience roundtables. This resulted in a drop in attrition levels from 50% to 10% and crucially, each successful participant was underwriting $40 million of business, which previously would have taken nine years of experience to reach. That has the capacity to be truly transformational in terms of business performance.

2) Think “campaign” not “course” in all your designs

When designing a training experience break it down into a more extended campaign of activities that are aligned with opportunities to practice and share the results with a network of peers, mentors and experts, transferring learning into active performance. Putting a social thread throughout the programme can help identify those who need additional encouragement and support and enable those who can move faster to build their expertise and experience at their own pace.

3) Bring staff and customers together in a shared learning experience

Social learning can be used to cut across silos and bring fresh thinking to communities. The most radical approach is to open up to the customer and involve them in the learning process of improving your products and services. Providing a forum for listening, contributing, explaining and reaching a new level of shared understanding reinforces both customer loyalty and staff engagement. Starbucks has had tremendous success with its My Starbucks Idea (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/) site where customers can contribute ideas for improvement and see them being seriously evaluated and implemented. This concept can be taken inside the organisation too. We all have internal customers and using similar tools to draw out what really makes a difference in real and perceived levels of service focuses limited time and resources on what matters most. This could transform your standing within the organisation.

Opening up

So as Chris Anderson of TED says, it is time to “invite the crowd, let in the light and dial up the desire”. In other words, leverage social tools and techniques to open up access to knowledge and expertise, remove unnecessary barriers and nurture a community that sees the powerful value of creating and sharing. A more fitting definition of accelerated learning, don’t you think? 

Move aside CPD, UPS is here...

This article originally appeared in Training Journal in June 2009 (PDF). In it I coin the term Ubiquitous Performance Support (UPS) as a better description of how workplace place learning will develop in the future. Comments welcome.

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Lars Hyland investigates how Continuous Professional Development is being transformed by digital connectivity and challenges how we assess competence and performance in the workplace.

The worst recession since the Second World War is having a profound effect on the workplace. Jobs are being lost in almost every sector, some being hit harder than others. Nearly half of the UK workforce plans a career change, by choice or otherwise. So, having relevant, marketable skills and experience is more important than ever and a priority for those wanting to stay in work or search for new work.

Training professionals are in the same position and must also remain skilled, as was recently demonstrated by the CIPD who responded to the changing economic conditions with its own set of redundancies in April. More significantly, perhaps, is the CIPD's own attempt to update its professional development programme and help build the skills of the HR community.

The new ‘HR Profession Map’ replaces the current CIPD Professional Standards and is a result of detailed consultation with HR directors across the main economic sectors, as well as senior professionals and academics. The map describes key HR knowledge areas, associated behaviours and sets out four bands of competence. This is designed to be more relevant to today's HR organisational landscape and deliver "sustainable capability".

Now, this could be said to be the goal for all workers no matter what their discipline, be they engineers or accountants. How do you stay relevant in a highly interconnected, global marketplace? Where does the responsibility lie for learning and development? Is it with the organisation you work for, or with you, the individual?

Personal brand challenges professional qualification as sign of quality

We all have anecdotes about our educational experiences, about how little we remember and how what we do remember has little practical value to the activities and jobs we do. Clearly, education strives to provide a platform for transferable skills, to give us adaptability and resilience to apply what we know in new and constructive ways.

Once in a job, continuous professional development intends to keep skills fresh and relevant, building on our real world experience. But does it? Too often qualifications misrepresent the value and capabilities of the person holding the certificate. All too frequently the curricula fail to keep up with the highly bespoke and rapidly changing realities of the workplace.

In today's digitally connected society, the value of a qualification is in danger of being superseded by a highly public individual record of activity and achievements - the personal brand.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in 1964 that: “The medium is the message”, recognising how new technologies impact our social and professional lives. The technology available today, from internet-enabled personal blogging to social networks such as Linkedin, enables the individual to provide the message personally and truly gives rise to the individual as the medium. This is a seismic shift in the flow of communication and information.

A controlled hierarchy has been replaced by a multi-nodal, interconnected network where each one of us control what we send, receive and participate in. The internet works this model efficiently and cost-effectively. The commercial world is now realising the shift in consumer attention with exponential growth in online advertising and marketing. We have always liked connecting, sharing and creating with others, but we now have the tools to do so easily. Television, news and print media are struggling to redefine their roles in the aftermath.

Education and training will follow this shift, as individuals realise they can consciously control their own learning and development. Crucially it doesn't have to look and feel like the classroom and lecture halls of old – although this remains a revelation to most adult learners.

Your personal brand - or in other words your social capital - could be described as a product of your academic, professional and life achievements and your network of contacts. Online media tools such as social networks (for example, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Xing) and content sharing (blogs, wikis, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter again) make it easy for individuals to control their own personal learning and sphere of influence.

This social capital cuts right across normal organisational boundaries and structures. The speed with which contacts can be made and expertise shared renders many traditional learning experiences achingly slow by comparison and frustratingly one-dimensional. It is this movement which has significant implications for the design of CPD support.

Impact of informal learning on CPD

Jay Cross, an active proponent of informal learning in the USA recently commented:

"As networks continue to subvert hierarchy, successful organizations will embrace respect for the individual, flexibility and adaptation, openness and transparency, sharing and collaboration, honesty and authenticity, and immediacy. Training is obsolete because it deals with a past that won’t be repeated. Learning will be redefined as problem-solving, achieving fit with one’s environment and having the connections to deal with novel situations."

Disappointingly, this world-view has yet to establish itself in any widespread reality. Much workplace learning is primarily formal in its delivery, using methods that at best make cursory use of the technology available to support and nurture a more effective and lasting learning experience.

Slowly, this is changing. Various market research surveys and studies in the past 6-12 months reveal a transformation towards a more blended learning experience. There is also an increasing use of e-learning and online collaborative exercises amongst geographically distributed groups of peers and mentors.

Brightwave's E-learning Trends Survey 2009 demonstrated this transformation by polling learning and development specialists within large UK organisations (5,000 plus employees). The survey revealed that while 80 per cent of total training budgets are likely to be cut or stay the same, half of the organisations are expecting their e-learning spend to rise.

This shift is being driven by the learners themselves, rather than HR it seems. An independent study commissioned earlier this year by the training provider, Cegos found that: "Half of employees across Europe want more e-learning and blended learning during the next three years, while only about 40 per cent of HR professionals plan to develop more programmes using these techniques.

“Learners are also keener to embrace collaborative tools like blogs, forums and wikis – 44 per cent of employees want to see these techniques developed, compared to just 32 per cent of HR professionals. Face-to-face learning is more popular among HR, with 42 per cent of respondents wanting to see more classroom learning compared to 38 per cent of employees."

With time and cost pressures growing, there is a real appetite for more flexible forms of learning. The same study found that over 80 per cent of employees were pleased with their e-learning and blending learning experiences. Employees were even calling for more work-based scenarios, self-assessment and tutor/peer support, rather than a return to traditionally exclusive classroom formats. This implies that HR professionals need to understand how to leverage technology to avoid being completely bypassed in the future, as predicted by Cross.

CPD in real time - Ubiquitous Performance Support

With the advent of real time, anywhere access to learning opportunities, it is now possible to offer what might be termed Ubiquitous Performance Support (UPS). Using a flexible, integrated set of tools that centre on your internet connected mobile phone, you can instantly query your professional and personal network of contacts to provide advice and guidance at the point and time of need.

At the same time, you can access your own personalised repository of knowledge, learning tutorials and other relevant content. The outcomes of how you perform in each situation can thus be recorded and self (and peer) assessed to help you improve your performance the next time you find yourself in a similar situation.

Just think of the power this environment has to support individual learning and performance. Instead of the inherently "just in case" model of CPD, which is subject to problems of updates and relevancy, UPS offers a "just in time" model that delivers actionable learning and accelerates the acquisition of practical experience. E-learning is crucial in underpinning this whole process from pre-induction (getting new starters up-to-speed) to ongoing performance support.

This thinking also extends the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Using Wikipedia (the reference resource of choice for the digital learner), PLEs are defined as:

"Systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to:

• set their own learning goals
• manage their learning; managing both content and process
• communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals."

Continuous Professional Development will need to find ways to accommodate this model of learning, providing a higher degree of flexibility and adaptability than ever before. This is more than likely to create some tensions. As the learning experience becomes more bespoke, it will increasingly challenge the concept of standards and levels of competency that are often used for comparison and assessment purposes.

Going further, how do you measure and certify completion? A common measure is contact time or hours learning. When using online tools, environments and peer networks, the learning becomes interwoven with normal daily activity - making it harder to quantify than attending a half-day course. Interestingly, the interwoven nature of the interaction is more effective in transferring the new learning experience into real performance improvement on the job.

Professional associations managing CPD credit schemes will need to work out viable and meaningful ways of measuring this learning activity when their target audience drifts away from more traditional learning. The International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET - www.iacet.org) is the caretaker of the CEU - Continuing Education Unit.

The IACET define the CEU as ten contact hours of participation in an organized continuing education experience under responsible sponsorship, capable direction, and qualified instruction. IACET CEUs may be: "Awarded by a college, association, company or any other organization willing and able to meet each of the ANSI/IACET 1-2007 Standard. Awarding IACET CEUs requires that a permanent record be established for each individual to whom IACET CEUs are awarded, and a transcript of that record must be made available upon request."

When learning activity is interwoven with other activities, how does this get meaningfully calculated? This is no doubt an interesting challenge, especially where learner activity records are spread out over many sites, services and personal interactions.

As I write this there is a significant amount of online discussion about the vagaries of measurement, including comments from the popular bloggers Tony Karrer and Harold Jarche. A serendipitous "Tweet" through Twitter pointed me to an amusing anecdote from Gloria Gery (http://www.gloriagery.com/articles/whydont). Gloria is a pioneer in the field of performance support systems and seeks real measures for learning effectiveness, she says:

“At a meeting one day, I suggested a new measurement criterion.

‘Why don't we weigh the students and report on a cost per pound?’

A deep quiet overcame the meeting. It was finally broken by a softly spoken question.

‘What?’

I guess I was being given a chance to reconsider, but I didn't take it.

‘Why don't we install a scale in the entry way,’ I said, ‘like the one they use for cattle. We can have each student stand on the scale before entering class each day. We can then calculate the return on our investment by volume.’

Needless to say, this attitude was a subject for much discussion both on that day and on my annual appraisal. While I wasn't exactly serious, the idea didn't seem any more irrelevant than some of the success indicators I was reporting on monthly.

None of the measurements I was supposed to take asked if anyone learned anything or if our interventions changed their performance.”

Measures that matter

As Gery rightly points out, traditional training measures (including hours spent "learning") demonstrate the separated nature of much training activity, which is divorced from the actual work context. Measures that matter - reducing errors, increasing productivity, reducing costs, increasing revenues are actually easier to track when learning is woven into the workplace environment.

CPD in its current form does contribute meaningfully towards this goal, but we really need to go further. We need to inject similar real time support across the board, just like my example above.

Looking forward

In lean times there is a tendency for organisations to cut back on overall training spend – although this short-term measure can in fact cause more long-term damage as it means you won’t be in good shape for the inevitable economic upturn and you risk losing the best talent.

In fact, there is an increasing importance of CPD during a recession, as re-skilling becomes more important for professional development with staff taking on new responsibilities if head count is cut. Furthermore, those that do take responsibility for their CPD are likely to be less impacted by the recession, and will come out with more skills.

Simply cutting training budgets is a mistake, because without effective investment in people and performance support when the economy picks up, opportunities will be missed. Indeed, many newly redundant people will discover that they can work productively in new ways outside the corporate structures they have left behind - and they may not return.

Instead of cutting budgets, organisations should instead focus their training attention on the business critical activities of the organisation. Thankfully, a new CiPD survey shows that despite the recession, 70 per cent of the HR community feels training will remain a high priority and CPD remains top of the agenda.

Social capital will inevitably grow in importance and the increased control we demand over our use of media - whether it be on-demand television or interactive shopping - will drive a wider thirst to be in control of our own learning and development. E-learning will continue to offer the most flexible learning opportunities and with mobile broadband internet access becoming more practical, my vision of ubiquitous performance support should become a reality for us all, not just the early adopters.

Research merry-go-round up

I've been sitting on a number of research/news snippets which are all interesting but demonstrate how fluid the respective fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and educational study are. Sometimes it's hard to draw immediately practical inferences. Things are moving so fast that you can move from positions of contradiction, congruence and back to contradiction in a matter of days. This can be confusing, especially when you throw in the usual journalist demand for a sensationalist angle.

These recent headlines are a case in point:

Brain training claims dismissed

A Which? report states the obvious around some popular brain training software such as those from Nintendo, Lumosity and Mindweavers. It's still too early for anyone to claim categorically that their tools can, in isolation, lead to improved cognitive function. Other environmental factors always play a key role, which makes conclusive studies difficult.

Knitting can delay memory loss

A US study supports engaging in a hobby prevents memory problems later in life (by 40%). Keeping physically and mentally active is the key message - again stating the obvious perhaps?

Texting improves language skills

A positive report that "textisms" could be having a beneficial effect on reading development. Also the University of Toronto found instant messaging had a positive effect on teenagers' command of language.

Social websites: bad for kids' brains?

A number of reports alleging that online networking and gaming have health risks. Susan Greenfield weighs in on the debate stating that young brains may be fundamentally altered by internet activity - which is again fairly obvious. Why just young brains? Old brains are (almost) just as plastic. For more on this, Donald Clark does a great job of putting her expert opinion under critical review.

Digging deeper

With all this potential for confusion I find it's important to trace things back to their sources where-ever possible as there are usually more solid nuggets of information to be found. I'll leave you with one interesting piece on a subject I've posted on before - memory and sleep. In this study, it has been found that stages of sleep have distinct influence on the process of learning and memory. Communication between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex appears to change when moving between SWS and REM sleep. When disconnected (as it is during REM sleep) you are more likely to forget newly formed memories, explaining perhaps why most dreams are forgotten.

Can social networks work within institutional walls?

I had an interesting comment from Mark on my article on Applying Social Networking in the Workplace. This statement got me thinking:


I think social networks within an organisation will become tremendously useful - think of the opportunities for knowledge sharing through the creation of pools of expertise across the organisation consisting of people who would otherwise be locked into some isolated project team. I think social networking behind the firewall has great potential that will hopefully be realised sooner rather than later.


Well, I agree that social software appears to have lots of natural applications within corporates, but a key challenge to their success is that users of social tools like these may not recognise the normal corporate boundaries as much as the current generation of managers. Indeed much of the value from these tools comes from offering direct contact with people who may have valuable information/collaborative input from your customer base, supplier base, completely different industry sectors, or even your own competitor base as well as your peers inside and outside your own organisation. In which case, networking tools that are limited within the corporate firewall may not get the long term grass roots support we might expect. Perhaps this is where initiatives such as OpenSocial come in to their own. But being open creates a bit of a paradox for many organisations who are highly protective of their internal processes and intellectual capital.

This is not to say that there are not examples of this already working within some corporates. This BBC business podcast - All Join In - cites some examples of social networking being used by the likes of T-Mobile and Ernst & Young (the representative here makes a great point about ensuring that the postings and discussion remain uncensored and "true" even if at first they appear negative to his own organisation).

I know Jay Cross has strong views on this, which are neatly summarised in his CLO article. Here's one key observation that supports my own thoughts:


Today’s executives grew up in a business world managed by industrial-age rules. Deeply ingrained beliefs are difficult, if not impossible to unlearn. Many managers pay unquestioned allegiance to the vestiges of the industrial paradigm. They believe in hierarchical organizational structures, top-down control, information hoarding, rigidity, formality, competition and undervaluing intangibles.

In the opposite corner, most network-age businesspeople support flat organizations, shared responsibility, information sharing, extreme collaboration, flexibility, informality, cooperation and the importance of social capital and reputation.

Few people have a foot in both camps. The industrial-agers see the network folk as undisciplined techno-optimists. The network-agers think of the industry people as clueless reactionaries. The conflict between the two groups is building.


The maxim "Networks subvert hierarchy" goes neatly with my reflection:

That old maxim "Knowledge is Power" appears to be waning. Maybe the new mantra should be "Your Network is Power".

Applying Social Networking in the Workplace

I wrote this article back in November for Learning Technologies magazine. I'm placing it here as a matter of record and to note that social networking tools are clearly important to accelerating the (effective) learning process.

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We are social animals by nature, so any technology that allows us to connect more efficiently and effectively with others will flourish. Mobile phones and the internet itself are testament to this fact. Social networking tools have been around since the internet started such as Usenet and the abundance of discussion forums available. What we have now allows us to extend our immediate network of friends to include the friends of our friends, and the friends of our friends of our friends. The principles of social networking rely on a new level of openness and sharing of information, personal and professional.

How many friends have you got?

Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, mySpace, Bebo, Xing – no doubt you've come across some if not all of these social networking tools by now. Indeed, you may be one of the 50+ million people across the world intently engaged with their Facebook home page, swimming in a sea of "pokes", invitations to play Scrabulous and solving the world's political ills through collective virtual action. HSBC in the UK recently felt the power of its bite when they tried to change the terms of their student bank accounts (in the favour of HSBC naturally). A revolt lead by users of Facebook forced a U-turn. David Cameron's recent endorsement at the Conservative Party conference showed how mainstream these tools have now become – although this could also mark its card amongst the trendsetters who having already abandoned mySpace, will look for the next cool community in which to hang out on the internet.

But underlying the hype are some powerful behaviours such as sharing knowledge, experience and information which the learning and development community ignores at its peril. However, the corporate reaction appears to be heading in the opposite direction. In September 2007 it was reported that a third of employers have banned their staff from using social networks such as Facebook over fears that it saps productivity and risks security. Several people have indeed lost their jobs through posting defamatory comments online while others have caused themselves professional embarrassment as their once private antics become easily searchable.
It seems that rather than work invading our private lives the opposite is in fact happening.
At the same time a YouGov poll found that half of all broadband users log onto social networking sites more than three hours a week, with a higher percentage of women active than men. This is a tidal wave of a trend that may be fruitless for corporate policy makers to battle against. Instead we should be looking for positive ways to harness this naturally enthusiastic behaviour.
Indeed, to this end, networks such as Facebook have developed business focused tools that allow the customisation and integration of company information. There are other organisations that offer business networking tools that are closed and focused, allowing a more private level of information exchange between employees of the same company. Motorola have already benefited from this approach describing improvements to the quality and cycle time of collaboration within the firm. Microsoft and IBM have also embraced social networking encouraging staff to publish their profiles and professional interests, to write blogs, and to engage in cross functional collaboration.

Divergence or Convergence?

When discussing new technology it's always good to keep a close eye on any underlying research as this tends to provide a clearer picture of the real value it holds. The Economist (2007) reported that Swisscom, Switzerland's largest telecoms operator, has a User Adoption Lab run by anthropologist Stefana Broadbent and their research has looked at usage patterns associated with different communications technologies. Based on observation, interviews, and user logs conducted across several European countries they found that despite the opportunity to keep in regular touch with a wide circle of friends through their mobile phones, the typical user spends 80% of their time communicating with just four other people.

Another interesting observation was how people used different communications technology in quite different ways. The fixed line phone was found to be the "collective channel", where calls are made "in public" because they are relevant to others around them. The mobile phone was predominantly used for last minute planning and to coordinate travel and meetings. Texting was used for "intimacy, emotions and efficiency", email for administration and to exchange documents and other media. While instant messaging and internet voice calls are "continuous channels" open in the background while people do other things. One of Broadbent's conclusions was that "each communication channel is performing an increasingly different function".
A remarkable discovery was that despite increased availability of essentially free voice communication, there has been little observed growth. Instead the increase has been in written channels. Broadbent observed, "Users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing over synchronous voice". We appear to be increasingly happy to multi-task and interleave our communication on a constant basis, irrespective of whether we are at work or at home.

Always connected

Tools such as Twitter (www.twitter.com) build on this trend to keep in constant touch by offering "micro-blogging". This enables you to send constant short messages to your community of what you are doing each step of the way. This can be done at your PC while you work (for example your message might be, "now working on XYZ project and calling Joe for an update") or out and about on using your mobile (for example, texting "heading towards Oxford Street, London"). This constant communication of your activity, its proponents tell me, leads to some useful interjections (such as "Joe's sick, call Amy instead") and chance meetings ("I'm at the top of Regent Street – want to meet for a coffee?"), that would not have happened without this channel being "always on".

This may not be your own idea of fun, but it is to a growing number of people who use it socially and are bringing it into work, expecting to be able to keep these channels always open. As HR and learning professionals, we need to be able to see the value of this type of behaviour for creating many more learning opportunities for individuals, and for accelerating and enhancing performance at work.

Applications in the workplace

Let's bring this back to a more traditional situation. We have a group of staff attending an off-site training event. This could be visiting a newly fitted shopping outlet that will eventually roll out across the network, or perhaps a product launch event. Or you could be a travel company, wishing to send a team to experience some new resort hotels. Logistically (and economically) not everyone can go. However, it is now possible for everyone to share in that experience.
Those attending could maintain a daily blog, posting their thoughts, photos/video taken on their phones. They could even use a micro-blogging tool on their phone to send back regular streams of where they are and what they doing. The wider community could get a lot closer to experiencing the event than they would otherwise; they can also participate. Sending back comments and responses means that those attending can ask questions on their behalf, can be reminded to complete certain tasks and generally support and share in the learning experience of their colleagues. This dialogue can continue after the event and when everyone is back in their normal roles, continuing to add helpful reinforcement.
These streams of communication can also work well for distributed teams, teleworkers (who are growing fast in number with the availability of broadband), job-sharers and any other community of people with a shared interest in keeping in the loop with each other.
Indeed, this can challenge the very design of traditional training experiences aligning activities more around "experiences" that are shared at the time they happen rather than the too often ineffective cascade once back in the office. An obvious place to start is in onboarding and induction of new employees. It's crucial to ensure new staff feel integrated into their new work environment and a company social network can accelerate that enormously. Indeed with profiles filled in during that "pre-joining" period, new staff can connect with staff of similar interests and job roles irrespective of geography. What a welcome that would be - and especially at a time of intense focus on employee engagement and board level fretting around finding and holding onto talent.

Elsewhere in the organisation, how about using wiki technology (see www.wikipedia.org to this in action) to build product knowledge and customer service know-how? The solution to a specific customer problem can be recorded directly by an employee and made available to everyone for comment, amendment and addition. Over a relatively short period of time you end up with a definitive solution that has benefited from substantial peer review.

The virtual world

Virtual worlds also offer a further dimension to collaboration, allowing users to interact with the environment around them as well as with each other. This has powerful learning potential by serving up experiences that accurately simulate situations that may occur in the real world. Tools such as Second Life are being joined by new, more flexible environments that can be adapted to specific applications. Indeed, one organisation is launching a service which will allow mini-virtual spaces within your own website enabling visitors to collaborate visually and instantly. What does this mean for learning design? Well, it emphasises how important simulation and immersion is to providing learners with much needed practice and safe opportunities to demonstrate new behaviours and skills.

If you think online collaborative environments are niche, consider these statistics from the book, Digital Korea by Tomi Ahonen and Jim O'Reilly. In South Korea 43% of the population have a personal profile in the virtual world Cyworld. Lineage, an online game, has 14 million users worldwide, which is twice as many as the often cited World of Warcraft.

What are you waiting for?

Embrace social networking and the prize is yours because it can accelerate innovation, problem solving and overall productivity with only the lightest of touches from traditional management hierarchies. Indeed, networks are already spawning co-operative working amongst individuals and small groups that can match (if not beat) the larger, traditionally structured corporate entities. All this is built on trust – without it these networks will quickly dissolve.
Learning has always been about content, context and collaboration. The network connects all these elements so it is accessible when, where and how you need it. With the new applications arriving as part of the Web 2.0 wave of innovation we can start to see how learning can be dramatically accelerated and made immediately actionable.

That old maxim "Knowledge is Power" appears to be waning. Maybe the new mantra should be "Your Network is Power". So beware. Build your network. It may be your only economic lifeline in the not too distant future.