01 JAN 11

In the old days, corporate training departments focused solely on workers on the payroll. Most of the effort went into getting novices up to speed and grooming fast-trackers as future leaders. Training departments largely overlooked improving the skills of seasoned employees, despite the fact that these were the people whose efforts were paying the bills.

A sponsor is the person who pays those bills. Sponsors are responsible for championing the case for change (i.e., the vision), visibly representing the change (i.e., walking the talk), and providing reassurance and confidence (i.e., the implementation plan).

14 NOV 09

The basics of informal learning and what to do about them

28 JUN 09

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

27 JUN 09

The future is people, not technology

My last column called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

29 MAY 09

The Internet is so pervasive that Internet values are blowing back into real life.

For example, I have no qualms about walking out of a boring presentation, even if I’ve been sitting in the front row. The Web trained me to click past unrewarding pages and spend my time where it will do me the most good.

I expect attitudes like Internet values to underpin exemplary corporate learning in the future. Here are nine more to ponder.

28 MAY 09

Companies are focused on sustainability. Staying alive is more important than quarterly earnings. This is a wonderful opportunity for experimentation on a grand scale. For the moment, companies can invest in longer-term projects without being penalized by financial markets that overemphasize the short term.

Organizations must seize the opportunity to change while things are in flux. It’s time for them to leap from current conditions to the brave new world of the future. Crossing a chasm takes a bold leap; baby steps won’t get you to the other side. Getting to the future will require innovation, luck and perseverance, but that’s the price of staying alive.

This big-picture, longer-term viewpoint is meta-learning, and we CLOs need to become chief meta-learning officers.

30 APR 09

When I began writing about eLearning in 1998, some of us felt the training industry had struck gold! We were going to change the world and pick up some dot-com riches while we did it. Irrational exuberance? We didn't think so at the time. eLearning was going to make email look like a rounding error. It reminded me of the spirit of Woodstock. People in the business exchanged knowing smiles. "We must be in heaven, man!"

15 MAR 09

Business has already squeezed the big process improvements out of its physical systems. But for many companies, collaboration and networking processes are virgin territory. The upside potential is staggering; people innovating, sharing, supporting one another—all naturally and without barriers. The traditional approach has been to automate routine tasks in order to reduce cost; the new vision is to empower people to take advantage of their innate desire to share, learn together and innovate.

04 MAR 09

01 MAR 09

The doyenne of performance support, remembered by two fervent admirers

Executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want performance. Informal does not mean unintentional. Those who leave informal learning to chance leave money on the table. Informal lear...

Training is something that’s pushed on you; learning is something you choose. Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Knowledge workers thrive when given ...

Training is something that’s pushed on you; learning is something you choose. Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Knowledge workers thrive when given ...

27 FEB 09

Scenario forecast

The first white paper to address eLearning

2002

26 FEB 09

Where did the dinosaurs go? The most respected scientific speculation today suggests that most dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid collided with earth. One group of dinosaurs did survive the asteroid crash: today we call them birds.

And what happened to performance support? In the 1990s, many people expected performance, to shove technical training into the shadows. Yet eLearning, blended learning, and virtual worlds seemed to have elbowed performance support into oblivion. Recent research finds that this is not the case. Performance support is stronger than ever; it simply hiding in plain sight, having taken on a new form.

People acquire the skills they use at work informally — talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal training and workshops account for only 10% to 20% of what people learn at work. Most corporations over-invest in formal training while leaving the more natural, simple ways we learn to chance.

Informal learning and formal learning are at opposite ends of the learning spectrum.

Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way most people learn to do their jobs. Informal learning is like riding a bicycle: the rider chooses the destination and the route. The cyclist can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or help a fellow rider.

Unexpurgated raw first draft. "The Author's Cut." Find out what didn't get into the book. Typos, far-out ideas, and topsy-turvy presentation. This is unedited. From the heart.

Open source, open space, grapevines and gossip, conversations and stories, learning spaces and learnscapes, unconferences and The World Cafe, podcasts and wikis, graphics and concept maps, complexity and community…these are part and parcel of the free-range learning I investigated relentlessly while writing Informal Learning



Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches create meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time, at minimal cost. Unconferences are characterized by:



* No keynote speaker or designated expert Breakthrough thinking born of diversity
* Having fun dealing with serious subjects
* Emergent self-organization
* Genuine community, intimacy and respect

Match learning needs with web 2.0 solutions. The reference pages that follow are meant to give you a bit of background and some places to get your questions answered. Most of this will soon be obsolete. Please add new things when you find them.

In the mid-sixties, computers were magic. The general public had no idea what they were. Mechanical brains.

Computers soon gained a malevolent reputation. They were the epidome of command and control. If we weren’t careful, the computers might get together and take over the world. Dr. Strangelove. Hal 9000. War Games. The East Coast Joint Computer Conference I attended in 1967 was all guys with ties: very corporate. Mainframes were cold things — in refrigerated glass rooms.

Yet when personal computers were born a decade later, they were friendly and benevolent.

In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noted that wealth was distributed unevenly. 20% of the people owned 80% of the assets. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, says that often, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

People inevitably shortchange the future by investing all of their energy in the present. Take the practice of management; it’s whirling around in a squirrel cage, running hard and going nowhere. Management values (e.g., control, precision, stability, discipline, and reliability) have not changed in a century. Business has streamlined strategy, production, services, and operations. We’ve cut the inefficiencies from every business process but the most important: management itself.

The business press, executive conferences, and other leading voices can’t stop talking about Web 2.0 and collaboration. You’ve read the stories: The web is now Web 2.0, the read/write web. Wikipedia is a user-written encyclopaedia written entirely by volunteers. Facebook and YouTube are growing faster than the web in its meteoric growth phase. Google’s P/E ratio is astronomical.

This is all well and good, but it provides no guidance to the business manager who wants to take advantage of the new technology.

Managers need to know the opportunities and the pitfalls, applications and benefits, tricks of the trade and where to begin.

Business firms evolve or die. Many organisations will not survive the journey from the industrial age to the network era.

Until a few hundred years ago, people lived in the countryside, farming the land with their families. Then the industrial revolution came along, and farmers became factory workers. Machines took over the physical work and managers improved efficiency. This is what most of us are accustomed to.

But brains are replacing machines. We are in the midst of a great transition to an era of networks and service. Einstein’s relativity has replaced Newton’s clockwork universe, not just in physics, but in the way we regard the world. Reality emerges from the interaction of complex adaptive systems; the future is unpredictable; nothing is certain. As in nature, everything is connected to everything else. Nothing is ever finished: the world is in perpetual beta, always evolving.

Unprecedented chnages in the role of the worker, the nature of business, the pace of innovation, the importance of intangibles, the explosion of information, and the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy have rendered traditional corporate learning obsolete. Jay Cross exposes the inadequacies of traditional learning and discusses a new paradigm for learning in the 21st Century.

The internet is such an all- consuming, pervasive model for business and society that the values inherent in the net are blowing back into RL (real life). For example, when I find myself in a boring situation, I have no qualms about leaving. It matters not that I was sitting in the front row and the speaker is supposedly a luminary. I learned this from clicking out of dullsville on the web. The values of the Internet Culture are the strongest foundation upon which to evolve a next-generation learnscape. At Learning Technologies, I will talk about the thinking that underpins successful informal learning networks such as togetherlearn. Learning professionals need to be cognisant of these tenets of internet culture: These are the four areas that will be included in my talk for successful informal learning.

Stephen's notes on my articles and posts over the years

ROI is often a mask for uncertainty or an attempt to quantify cost-benefit with accounting principles that don't count people as assets. I contend that the business return on an e-learning investment should be so obvious that you can figure it out on the back of a napkin.



Traditionally, executives assume training has little or no impact on revenue, so they measure training benefits in terms of cost savings. This works against e-learning, in which increases in top-line revenue generally exceed reduced expenses by a wide margin. Enter metrics.

During my two years at HBS, I devoured in the neighborhood of a thousand cases. Except for a funky computer simulation, a screening of Twelve Angry Men, and a handful of role-play exercises, everything was taught with cases. HBS was slavishly devoted to the case method of instruction and tried to force-fit case study into every instructional situation. Give a kid a hammer….

Update: I just came upon an article on the web that talks of eLearning in 1997. That pre-dates my earliest eLearning articles. From now on, when asked if I invented the term eLearning, I’m going to point the questioner here and say, no, it wasn’t me, it was that guy.

Frankly, I prefer to be known as the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning than for naming something, in the company of others, more than ten years ago.

(Heraclitus) of Ephesus wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Everything flows and nothing abides. Even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe. If we do not exepect the unexpected, we will never find it.” He was ahead of his time.

"If Olympic athletes approached running the marathon the way business people approach learning, they would show up for the race without having trained. Learning is a skill, not a hard-wired trait. The discipline of meta-learning seeks to re-invent learning as a self-correcting, ever improving process. Its measure of success is not effort, but business results."

Spoof on Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language based on a visit to his house

"Your elevator pitch is what you say when your CEO steps onto your elevator and asks what you're doing. You'll probably include the three basic elements of marketing design: your brand, your position, and your target segments."

"eLearning" was invented in the euphoria of web madness that swept through Silicon Valley in the wake of Netscape's IPO.

The ROI of learning depends on the learner's degree of freedom and performance-level. Imagine a spectrum of workers, arrayed by how well they perform. Provide training. Often you'll receive a:

· 50% gain from a worker in the lowest 25%

· 200% gain from an average worker

· 500% gain from a worker in the top 25%

· 10,000% gain from a top 1% worker

It struck me that leaders needed not only to work on skills but also to work on themselves. Leading a team into uncharted territory required confidence and self-knowledge. Successful leaders knew who they were, were mindfully aware of what was going on around them, and exuded confidence that they could get the job done. My marketing antennae told me this personal empowerment angle would also make for a popular course.

At the time I was doing my research, Harvard Business School’s John Kotter was championing the concept that leaders and managers are entirely different breeds. The manager keeps things on track; the leader breaks through obsolete boundaries. Managers control; leaders inspire.

"There are three types of people in the world, those who can count and those who can't." -Anonymous

Computers are bipolar. A bit is on or off. 1 or 0. Unless you're a digital processor, this binary thinking can trick you into oversimplifying what's going on.

The human world is not yes or no; it's a sea of maybes. Most decisions aren't black or white; they're shades of gray. Are you liberal or conservative? Perhaps like me, you're a little of each.

Treating the world as an open-or-shut case leads to thought crimes like "The Internet changes everything." In my work, I struggle with the knuckle-headed assumption that learning must be either instructor-led or computer-delivered rather than a blend of the two. Few things in life are really all or nothing.

"Computer scientists have a tendency to count '1, 2, 3, one million…'as if scale were insignificant once the first steps were taken." - John Seeley Brown, Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information

26 FEB 09

Ask me, I'll tell you: Return-on-investment isn't what it used to be.

This traditional financial measure, developed by DuPont and once credited with making General Motors manageable, hasn't kept pace with the times. The R is no longer the famous bottom line and the I is more likely a subscription fee than a one-time payment.

Until recently, most training decisions were incremental. Training sponsors had most of the infrastructure required: an empty room, staff, flipcharts, markers, perhaps some personal computers. Business unit managers could evaluate the cost-effectiveness of one-shot training courses by assessing cost and effect within their own business units. E-learning changes this, though.

E-learning is a continuous process, not a one-shot deal. It is most often an enterprisewide initiative, beyond the bounds of any individual business unit. And investing in e-learning is often a strategic imperative--the entry ticket to an e-business environment.

Time is accelerating, and we’ll get there even sooner than we expect. The past was leisurely. Today the future is rushing toward us.

Unnatural as it feels, we must project ourselves months and years ahead to start getting ready. Snap judgments are not sufficient to see us through. The world’s getting too complicated.

This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. Workers who know more get more accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions than those who are not. Employees and partners with more capacity to learn are more versatile in adapting to future conditions. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do.

It’s all a matter of learning, but it’s not the sort of learning that is the province of training departments, workshops, and classrooms. Most people in training programs learn only a little of the right stuff, are fuzzy about how to apply what they’ve learned, and never address who are the right people to know.

People learn to build the right network of associates and the right level of expertise through informal, sometimes even accidental, learning that flies beneath the corporate radar.

Sam Adkins and I realized we had a potentially volatile situation on our hands. The day before, J.D. Edwards had sued Larry Ellison personally for being a jerk in the then-iffy PeopleSoft takeover attempt. Several others at the table considered one another back-stabbers. Up front, Sam and I explained that we were assuming the personas of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies. This wasn’t good cop/bad cop; this was good cop/crazy cop. Sam would play the docile Danny Glover role; I would be Mel Gibson. Rather than hopping off buildings, I would control the microphone.

Web services and services-oriented architecture are utterly geeky terms for describing the most important advance in computing since the byte. Finally, computing is going to serve business instead of enslaving it.

How will this sea change in IT come about? By using the same principles that fuelled the titanic growth of the Internet: interoperability built on simple, common standards; flexibility; faster cycle times; decentralized control; incremental development; repurposing of content; the promise of wealth; and the collaboration of countless true believers.

We are more accustomed to production workers who have job descriptions and follow a script. Future workers will be value-driven because there is no script. Everything will be improvised. Learning will be fused into work, delivered in small fragments ("right size") on whatever device tethers them to the Internet ("right device" and "right place") just when they need it ("right time"). In other words, we will have what we call workflow learning.

Rummler and Brache (hereafter, R & B) apply a systems view to improving performance in business organizations. They contend that most managers don't understand their own businesses. The managers may know their products and their customers, but they don't know the processes where raw material is converted into products nor how those products are sold or distributed. In fact, they often manage the organization chart (a verticle slice) instead of the business (which is the value chain flowing horizontally).

Is it not nutty for a learning strategist to ask “Why blend?” The more appropriate question is, “Why not blend?” Imagine an episode of This Old House asking, “Why should we use power tools? Hand tools can get the job done.” For both carpenters and learning professionals, the default behaviour is using the right tools for the job.

15 FEB 09

Training departments of yore focused most of their energy on events and processes to push information, much of it prepackaged. Wikis pull people to learn when they feel the need. The information they find largely is created by the users themselves.

Companies are discovering wikis are a way to share knowledge, store the "rules of thumb" of work communities, keep documentation current, cut e-mail bottlenecks and eliminate duplicate effort. They are also lightweight technology. And they're cheap.

The downside is that wikis are weird.

What would you think of an assembly line where workers didn't know where to find the parts they were supposed to attach "Hey! Anybody see any fenders"

Absurd, you say. Heads would roll. Yet for knowledge workers, this is routine. Consider a knowledge worker stymied by a lack of information-hardly an uncommon situation. In fact, in many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers and helping their colleagues do the same.

How does our knowledge worker respond She's five times more likely to turn to another person than to an impersonal source, such as a database or a file cabinet.

Businesses exist to create value, and the source of value resides outside the learning function. As Peter Drucker has pointed out, "Neither results nor resources exist inside the business. Both exist outside. The customer is the business."

Try to imagine a business without customers, perhaps an insurance company on a desert island or a manufacturer that never ships. No value, right 

Training directors bemoan not being able to demonstrate significant business results. If they remain entirely within the training function, they never will, because they don't own the yardstick that measures business results. Generally, it's training's sponsor, the person with authority to sign off on large expenditures. This is usually a company officer who can weigh the potential returns and costs of various investments and select those likely to create the highest net value. Since the sponsor decides training programs' economic fate, it's worthwhile to contemplate how sponsors typically make decisions

Admission and travel to conferences claim a significant amount of many corporations' investment in learning. That's why CLOs need to be aware of a fresh alternative that costs less and works better.

Professionals attend conferences to learn things, yet conference participants often say they learn more in the hallway than in formal sessions. Unconferences bring the hallway conversations back into the main tent by handing control to participants instead of experts on stage.

The higher you go, the farther you see. Recent research finds that CLOs work on short-term efficiency while other C-level officers look beyond to long-term prosperity. The CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and other longer-tenured C-level officers look to learning to build the capacity to transform the business. Their goals are long-term, qualitative and aspirational. CLOs are more focused on short-term improvements in how learning takes place. They work with business units to make training more efficient. They introduce technology and innovation to streamline the delivery of learning.

Go forward a few years, and our current notion of learning grows obsolete. The pace of change itself is accelerating. In the past, workers learned how to do something. In the future, they will need to learn what changed last night. In the past, execution required knowledge and skill. Future execution will require ingenuity, alacrity and innovation.

Informal learning and formal learning are aspects of an overall spectrum of learning as a whole. Imagine an audio mixer in a recording studio, one of those units with dozens of sliders that enable you to boost the vocals, downplay the guitar, etc.

Our "learning mixer" has sliders for characteristics such as content, delivery, duration, authorship and development time. You don't achieve the best mix by moving all of the sliders to the top or to the bottom.

The "delivery slider" moves from courses and push (formal) to conversations and pull (informal). Duration goes from hours (formal) to minutes (informal). Subject matter ranges from curriculum (what the organization says - formal) to discovery (what the individual needs - informal) Timing goes from outside of work to during work. Development time ranges from months (events - formal) to minutes (connections - informal).

Most people arrive at adulthood having built the foundational skills, mental models and working knowledge they need to get along in the world. Adults learn when they need to solve pressing problems. They don't have patience for superfluous material or rehashing what they already know. Curriculum is for kids-exploration is for adults.

Veteran workers who are savvy in the way things work are most organizations' top performers. In the factory, the best worker was perhaps twice as productive as the worst. In the knowledge economy, the best worker is hundreds of times more productive than a mediocre peer. Top performers justify special handling.

What portion of your workforce is made up of green recruits What fraction already knows the ropes How many are top performers If you're like most organizations, your old hands outnumber the new recruits 10 to one. The western world's workforce is aging. Yet all too often, trainers treat learners as if they were all the same.

The structure of business, the role of workers and the architecture of software are changing before our very eyes. Business is morphing into flexible, self-organizing components that operate in real time. Software is becoming interoperable, open, ubiquitous and transparent. Workers are learning in small chunks delivered to individualized screens at the time of need. Learning is becoming a core business process measured by key performance indicators. Taken together, these changes create a new kind of business environment-a business singularity.

Businesses are evolving into networks. What happens inside the walls is not nearly as important as the flow of value from raw material to customer. Networks shared among suppliers, partners and customers integrate the business into a commercial ecosystem-a larger network.

Cliff Atkinson's book "Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate and Inspire" shows how to use Hollywood's script-writing techniques to focus your ideas, how to use storyboards to establish clarity and how to properly produce the script so that it best engages the audience.

Atkinson recently told me the story of a presentation that made a $250 million difference. Attorney Mark Lanier pled the case against Merck in the first Vioxx-related death trial, brought by the widow of a man who died of a heart attack that she believed was caused by the painkiller. Before preparing his presentation, he read "Beyond Bullet Points," and invited Atkinson to Houston to lend a hand in putting his presentation together.

"We used the three-step approach from the book," Atkinson said.

ecent advances in information technology, such as podcasting, will profoundly impact knowledge management, corporate training and in-house communication. Just as blogging gave us all a personal printing press, podcasting gives us an inexpensive, personal broadcasting studio. Subscribers can download short radio shows to their iPods or MP3 players. Microsoft recently threw its weight behind the open-source software that makes all this happen. We'll soon reach the tipping point.

you are the most important person in the universe.
so is everyone else.

-e. e. cummings

Ultimately, you're responsible for the life you lead. It's up to you to learn what you need to succeed. That makes you responsible for your own knowledge management, learning architecture, instructional design and evaluation.

Professionally, we design learning experiences to meet concrete objectives. We plan ahead to prepare for the future. We try to avoid reinventing the wheel. We build systems to leverage the knowledge we already possess. We gather feedback so we can do better next time.

Personally, we should do no less. Intellectual capital is what separates winners from losers, and I want the best I can get. My personal learning and knowledge management are too important to leave to chance. So are yours.

Ten years ago, most business executives saw no value in the Internet beyond possibly cheaper communications. CIO magazine's December 1994 issue sheepishly proposed "not to laud the future of electronic commerce nor to cheerlead the creation of a great national network that, like Godot, may never materialize."

A representative skeptic said, "So far, I haven't seen anybody use the Internet for anything that was all that worthwhile." Another CIO chimed in, saying "There's so much non-business stuff on the Internet that you have to wonder if people are getting their jobs done."

Ten years, not that long ago, 38 million people had Internet access. Next year, Internet users will top a billion. The pros missed a sea change.

When Pacioli invented double-entry bookkeeping to measure shipping in Venice 500 years ago, intangibles didn't count for anything. Of course, the stock prices of companies such as Google indicate things have changed in our times.

Yet, business managers still act as if something invisible is worthless because it can't be seen and sized up. Vestiges of Industrial Age thinking about value live on inside corporate walls. ROI is a useful concept, but it's not if you leave out the intangibles.

Measuring intangibles involves making judgment calls, so managers often exclude these factors from their calculations. These people tote up the numbers for things they can see and count, and then they list intangibles on the side, as if this keeps their calculations pure. This is nonsense.

It's all a matter of learning, but it's not the sort of learning that is the province of training departments, workshops and classrooms. At work we learn more in the break room than in the classroom. We discover how to do our jobs through informal learning-observing others, asking the person in the next cubicle, calling the help desk, trial and error and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning-classes and workshops and online events-is the source of only 10 percent to 20 percent of what we learn at work.

Walk into the sales department, the warehouse, the call center or the executive suite, talk with the people there, and you know what you'll discover The members of the organization are known as "workers." They are blue-collar workers, knowledge workers, hourly workers, commission-only workers and contractors doing work-for-hire. Nobody calls them "learners."

The rhetoric about learners lulled us into thinking that the job was to prepare individual learners. In the real world, superior performance more often results from the efforts of coordinated teams of workers who work well with customers. As Abraham Maslow famously said, "Give a kid a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail." In our case, it's, "Call them learners instead of workers, and every solution looks like blended learning."

Executives don't see it this way at all. Have you ever read a proposal for a major project that didn't list executive support as a prerequisite to success?

That future has arrived. Today a healthy percentage of learning in corporations is technology-assisted. At first we thought it was all about content, but context-free courseware failed for lack of human support. Pioneering online communities turned into ghost towns.

Then we realized that e-learning is a bundle of capabilities, not a silver bullet. When e-learning technology supplements traditional learning, it usually saves time, money and drudgery. Properly implemented, e-learning is a powerful, cost-effective tool. No longer the "next big thing," e-learning has hit the mainstream.

When I tell training vendors "courses are dead," they look at me as if I'd brought a skunk to their picnic.

Roger Shank sums up the failure of training in four little words: "It's just like school." The better part of two decades of schooling has brainwashed, er convinced, us that courses are the default means of learning. People think of courses as the basic, fundamental model against which other modes must compare themselves. Propose that workers learn something through conversation, a game, or trial and error, and the knee-jerk response is "How do you know it will be as effective as a course"

Small wonder that executives hear the word "learning," think "schooling" and conclude "not enough payback." Executives respond better to "execution."

Everything is connected. Each of us is enmeshed in innumerable networks. You're linked to telephone networks, satellite networks, cable feeds, power grids, ATM networks, the banking system, the Web, intranets, extranets and networks that are local, wide, wireless, secure, virtual and peer-to-peer.

Social networks interconnect us in families, circles of friends, neighborhood groups, professional associations, task teams, business webs, value nets, user groups, flash mobs, gangs, political groups, scout troops, bridge clubs, 12-step groups and alumni associations.

Is your organization ready for massive change Have your people learned how to cope with increasingly fast cycle times, escalating ambiguity and avalanches of incoming information Do you have a Plan B if your current structure proves too brittle

Futurists warn that we are rounding the knee of an exponential curve of communications, business and technology. It's hard to imagine change of this magnitude. It reminds me of an experience I had on a recent trip to Abu Dhabi.

Camel stew is delicious, so I tore another chunk from the platter in front of me. The fellow across the table was eating Omani lobster. He was the first non-native to be awarded citizenship in the United Arab Emirates.

A simple stack of cards can have a greater impact on performance than a fancy multimedia production. Let's look at a few examples.

In the past, organizations often sent a single individual to an outside meeting, believing that he or she would bring the message home to share. This rarely happens because the individual is the wrong unit of production for taking advantage of learning innovation.

Organizations that send teams are more likely to put things into practice. Colleagues reinforce one another; an individual is but a lone voice. A small team cannot only plant the seeds of innovation but also nurture them, so the optimal unit for an innovation-building session is a trio, not a single person.

Networks arise when isolated entities link to one another. Improvements in communications tech-nology (e.g., the invention of language, writing, printing, mass communication, computer networks) encourage connections. The denser its linkages, the shorter a network’s cycle time. Speed begets speed.

The connections that knit us together make us interdependent. Because other members of the network impact what you do, you lose even the illusion of control. The future becomes unpredictable.

Imagine having your own, custom version of the Internet running behind your firewall.

Internet Inside is more complicated than that, but not much. Most of the software is open-source: Drupal, SourceForge, MediaWiki, WordPress, some crawling utilities, browsers and RSS, coupled with a typical intranet infrastructure and the Microsoft Office/Exchange suite.

Because few people will willingly change the basic way they send and receive information, participants send and receive information via their Microsoft Outlook accounts. The other software is free or cheap — not a trivial matter. A typical proprietary application that goes for $50 a seat is a million-dollar expense for a company the size of CGI. Also, the open-source community continuously improves the software’s design, making incremental improvements instead of disruptive installations of new versions.

“Next week, we will close the training department. We are shifting our focus from training to performance. Any remaining training staff will become mentors, coaches and facilitators who work on improving core business processes, strengthening relationships with customers and cutting costs.

“I’m changing my title from VP of training to VP of core capabilities. My assistants will become the director of sales readiness and the director of competitive advantage, respectively. The measure of our contributions will be results, not training measures. We’re scrapping the LMS posthaste. Wherever possible, we’re replacing proprietary software with open source.

Astute CLOs keep all their programs in beta. A dozen years ago, software developers said a program was “in beta” if it was nearly finished but not ready for release. (“Alpha” meant the application was a collection of scraps that only a developer could run.)

Netscape changed the meaning of beta forever. Instead of limiting beta tests to a small, handpicked group of users outside the company, Netscape posted beta releases on the Internet. Anyone could download the latest beta version. Many of us did. Improvements in the Web’s early days came fast and furious, so we downloaded betas time after time after time. Netscape received feedback and suggestions from thousands of users. This accelerated product development, and that led to even more frequent beta releases. Running the most recent beta version was a sign of derring-do.

Learning is woven into the fabric of every modern business. It’s the way we adapt to change. We’ve got to rid ourselves of the notion that learning is just the chief learning officer’s business. Learning is so much more than that. Learning is the lifeblood of commerce, and it’s every corporate citizen’s job to make it better. It’s time to invite customers to join the party.

Learning and social networks and customer communications and partner relations and marketing and sales aren’t islands. They’re all facets of the same thing: the corporate commons of work and learning. Some astute companies are exploring how a social learning community can remove barriers separating customer and corporation. It’s all about learning conversations.

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.

While the access to the Web and use of social media are way up from when Internet Time Group conducted a similar study a year ago, the overall picture is not rosy. Most of the organizations that responded are sailing stormy seas without a rudder:

• Less than half reported that their professionals and/or teams form communities of practice.
• A third of the respondents disagreed with the statement, “People here understand how their work is linked to the overall goals of the organization.”
• Nearly half reported they do not take time to reflect on what they might learn from a major success or failure.
• Most reported that it’s difficult to set up an in-house blog or wiki.
• A strong majority disagreed with the statement that their “formal training is superb.”
• Two-thirds reported that their organizations are slow to change, even when it would be in their best interest.

Hans Monderman is a Dutch traffic engineer who is gaining fame for what he doesn’t do.

He’s also famous for what he doesn’t like: traffic signs. His reasoning is that over-engineering drains things of context, civic responsibility fades, reckless driving ensues and people get hurt.

Being told to take a training course is like driving on a road with signs, stripes and bumps. If workers take a training course but don’t learn, what’s their reaction “The training wasn’t any good.”

Instead of training, tell workers what they need to know to accomplish the job. Offer a variety of ways to get up to speed, from treasure hunts to finding information on the company intranet. This makes learners take responsibility, and there’s no longer an excuse for not learning.

15 AUG 08

"I've been doing this for what seems to be forever," said Jay Cross, when asked how he got into the e-learning industry. As the first person to have used the term "e-learning" on the web, his reply is pretty open-ended.

Nevertheless, the e-learning icon can pin-point the beginning of his career to the day in 1976 when a former colleague asked for his help with a client in need of an assessment of the market for a new service. The offering was to be an accredited university business degree programme designed for adults. Studies would take place after hours at the workplace.