As we researched the social media space and started putting together our strategy plans this idea of social learning kept coming up. The idea first came to my attention back in October 2008 at the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference in Chicago. Daniel Perry of Aramark spoke about how they create internal communities so that new hires can share information, reinforce their learning’s, and provide mutual support.
This sounded really interesting – a sales organisation utilising social media tools and strategies to provide a platform for greater collaboration and knowledge capture – but the idea of social learning hadn’t gelled. In fact it wasn’t until one of my TEC group members (known as Vistage in the US) raised a point about the problems they were having in capturing informal knowledge from the field that I connected the dots. At the same time as this I read a couple of blog posts by David Wilkins from Mzinga and I realised just how important social learning has become.
In simple terms, social learning is about using social media technologies to close the gap that exists between the training/learning the enterprise provides and the informal learning that is always happening within the enterprise. I thought what Aramark was doing was very cool and I often mentioned this example to people as a good example of using social media tools to reinforce key learning and knowledge.
That was until I read David’s post about the future of training. The key thing with this post is the Cross and Jarche model of social learning (see diagram)
Jay Cross and Harold Jarche map the future of learning in the enterprise
Jay and Harold describe a pyramid where emergent practices come from the workers, established practices and processes come from management, and workers actively collaborate with each other as part of the normal work experience.
I realised then that Aramark had only part of the solution. Aramark were using the technology to make sure training was sticky, that sales reps stuck to the pitch and that the field sales managers didn’t start debunking the training with “real world observations”. For Aramark, the real advantage would come if they embraced learning from the field and formalised this into their enterprise. So rather than suppressing “real world observations and variations” they would encourage this and formalise this into their enterprise memory (and therefore their training).
Given most learning and collaboration happens away from where training is delivered, capturing this informal learning is the real challenge for the enterprise. But it doesn’t stop there. Like most social media initiatives, changing the cultural attitude around learning will be challenging also. A great place to start for organisations wanting to start down this road is to implement enterprise wiki solutions like Confluence from Atlassian (Disclosure: we’re an Atlassian partner for the Confluence product). Confluence (as a hosted Wiki) can be live in minutes and allows collaboration to start occurring. I’d still recommend getting a strategy in place and getting wide buy-in, but starting with something is still the most important first step.
The outcome of reading David’s stuff is we’re putting more research effort into understanding what this means and how it fits into an overall social media strategy. When you think about the idea of opening up your enterprise information and allowing the community to take it, use it, and add value, we mustn’t forget that the community is in fact a series of intersecting communities as David noted in a later post.
A very useful image from David Wilkins of Mzinga
As I noted to my TEC colleague – harnessing this knowledge and learning represents real strategic advantage. So whilst we talk about the fantastic marketing, PR, and sales benefits to flow from social media, we must also keep our eye on the positive impacts this can have on how the enterprise learns and grows.
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