Communities of practice are dynamic social structures that require both initial design and ongoing cultivation so they can emerge and grow.  However, through a series of steps, learning professionals and community members can design a community environment, foster the formalization of the community, and plan activities to help grow and sustain the community. But ultimately, the members of the community will define and sustain it over time.

Here are most of the activities listed from the session.  Some are slightly edited for consistency or to merge with similar items to create a single list.

Please visit my new blog Performance X Design to see the list.

Note:  The Gram Consulting blog has been discontinued…I post blog introductions here  to encourage Gram Consulting readers to subscribe to the new blog.   Please come on over…

Leadership Development in a Learning 2.0 World

• Contrast current leadership development practices with learning 2.0 driven practices
• Describe benefits of learning 2.0 for transforming leadership and management development
• Describe a model of leadership development driven by learning 2.0 principles
• Envision a future Leadership Development program for your organization on a by a learning 2.0 foundation
• Define strategies for integrating learning 2.0 concepts into current leadership development programs

To read the full post and view the conference presentation please visit Performance X Design.

It’s been a challenge to get back to the blog as I have been finishing Gram Consulting work,  closing out the business and transitioning into a new full time position. Things are starting to settle down and I now hope to get back to posting more regularly. Thanks for the well wishes and inquiries from regular readers since I started the blog.   Onward…

e-Learning: What’s hot, what’s not

I received a request from a colleague last week who is helping a company put together a learning strategy, part of which will focus on e-learning. Her question was this:

what’s hot and what’s not in e-learning these days ?

I gave it a bit of thought and came up with the following lists. I would love to hear your additions or deletions from the list (as would my colleague).

Please visit Performance X Design to read the full article….

The new position however, offers broader opportunity and challenge, including working for an industry leader in corporate learning and development and a great team of people.  My new role is Vice President, Leadership and Business Solutions with Nexient Learning Inc. I ‘ll be managing the consulting, design and development of custom e-learning and performance improvement projects as well as a portfolio of excellent leadership and business skills development programs.

I’m planning to keep the blog alive.  In the next few weeks I plan to move  it to a new home and adjust the format and branding a bit.   It will cover similar ground,  so if you like what you’ve read so far, I hope you follow the new blog after the transition.   I’ll be bringing all the existing posts to the new site.   In the meantime I’ll likely post a few more items to this location.

I’ve truly enjoyed your comments both through the blog and personal connections.  The blog has enjoyed a steady increase in readership since I started a little less than a year ago.  Thank you for that.   I’ve enjoyed the conversation.  I hope we can keep it going.

Cheers,

Tom

The research is based an an annual survey of 1700 companies from across the globe in a range of industries and functional areas and has been ongoing now for about three years running.  The Mckinsey Quarterly recently summarized results in an interactive visual chart and as a full article in the McKinsey Quarterly titled How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results (The article is free but you have to join the free membership to see it in full).

The following chart from the interactive feature summarizes how web 2.0 technologies are being used for some internal purposes including managing knowledge and training.   Internal blogs and wikis are being used significantly for Managing Knowledge. For Training uses the highest categories are Podcasts and Video Sharing (unfortunately the most  presentation oriented technologies of the bunch).   Social Networking is being used extensively for fostering collaboration and identifying and recruiting talent.

Click to access the McKinsey interactive chart

If you go to the interactive feature be sure to listen to the “about this research” audio snippet.  It provides a brief summary of the research and findings across three years.   Some conclusions McKinsey draws:

• an increasing number companies are adopting web 2.0 technologies
• more companies will start to use them for wider purposes including customers, internal employees and suppliers
• uses will continue to evolve and get better at deriving business value

the striking result is that 2/3 of the companies are deriving measurable business value.

McKinsey summarizes:

“This year’s survey turned up strong evidence that these advantages are translating into measurable business gains.  When we asked respondents about the business benefits their companies have gained as a result of using Web 2.0 technologies, they most often report greater ability to share ideas; improved access to knowledge experts; and reduced costs of communications, travel, and operations.  Many respondents also say Web 2.0 tools have decreased the time to market for products and have had the effect of improving employee satisfaction”.

Are you ready for Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge (B.O.O.K)?  Apparently “thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and investors are reported flocking to the medium”

I learned about the new device through this B.O.O.K MARK while browsing a local supplier of B.O.O.K on the weekend.

In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?” ASTD Learning Circuits big question for July

The Learning Circuits big question this month is an important one, but there seems to be a few questions embedded in it.  Does it ask what new skills are needed by learning professionals due to a wider variety of learning solutions?…or due to more rapid churn?…or due to the implied technology knowledge of the “learning 2.0 world”?  They are related of course, but they do each point to different skill requirements.  As a result answers to the question so far have been enjoyable but a bit a bit helter-skelter.

Harold Jarche nails the “learning 2.0″ aspects of the question with his update of last year’s excellent Skills 2.0 article–especially from a personal learning perspective.  Nancy White highlights general competencies that would be of value to any knowledge worker in today’s workplace.  Mohamed Amine Chatti identifies knowledge networking and double loop learning as critical. I like those.  But again not necessarily specific to the learning professional.  Natalie Laderas-Kilkenny gets closer to skills that are important for the learning professional and says that a learning culture is an important precursor for successful learning 2.0. Right on!

Michael Hanley layers a business view on the question (thank you!) and charts some necessary skills.  I also like Clive Sheppard’s view that we don’t need to tear up the rule book and start again–that our mission remains (organizational performance) but we need to ramp up more quickly on current technology and methods.  Couldn’t agree more.

What Learning Professional?

The question also lumps “learning professionals” into a single group.  Most large training functions have many specialized roles and their skill requirements vary.  So here’s another layer to the big question discussion based on different slices of the “learning professional” roles that are out there.

Generally, most learning professionals will need a combination of these three skills to thrive in the learning 2.0 world.

• User level knowledge of web 2.0 tools and their applications

• Open attitude towards sharing, collaborating, contributing, and personal knowledge management that underlie their effective use.

• Facilitating non-formal and informal learning solutions (technology assisted or otherwise)

How these skills take shape in various learning roles will vary by responsibility.    Here are a few:

Instructors

With over 60% of corporate learning still delivered in the classroom (ASTD 2008 State of the Industry report) there are a lot of instructors out there.  They need to develop sophisticated skills in the facilitating, coaching and mentoring using on-line and web 2.0 tools.  As classroom programs are extended or moved into on-line communities and action learning programs (see couching ourselves for a good example) coaching and facilitating skills will be essential.  Since these communities will focus as much on work as on learning, facilitators will also need a serious understanding of their organizations to maintain credibility in these contexts.

New skills:

• Online facilitation and coaching using web 2.0 and other collaborative tools
• Action learning coaching
• Organizational knowledge and experience

Analysts and Performance Consultants

The long and ponderous needs assessment is dead.  Speed is essential.  Web 2.0 tools can help the analyst. First, the social media environments that communities now operate in can be a rich source of performance data to mine for skill and knowledge gaps and to signal when a team needs to bring more focus to capturing learning and knowledge. There are also many useful web 2.0 orientated tools for data gathering and internal “crowdsourcing” that can be used to collect employee feedback, replace old flipchart voting methods and set priorities.  See UserVoice for example.

Also performance consultants will need to breakdown the traditional “training vs. non-training” solution duo into more nuanced solutions that integrate learning and work. There are powerful levers on the non-training side of that equation than need to be part of the future solution set rather than a casual handoff to another department.

Evaluation takes a different shape in the web 2.0 world as well.  It’s easy to determine performance impact for hard skill programs but the softer learning and knowledge sharing associated with communities and natural learning methods is a bit of a measurement bugaboo.  New ways of measuring learning need to be developed and incorporated into the toolkit.  I think Binkerhoff’s success case method has great promise here.

New skills:

• Web 2.0 tools for data collection and analysis
• Broader understanding of non-formal and informal learning solutions when recommending “non-training solutions”
• Building learning roadmaps and curriculum design efforts to include social learning activities
• Success case method for measuring informal learning programs

Relationship Managers

Most large training functions have generalists that maintain relationships with internal client groups to assess high level needs and assemble teams to meet those needs.   I see opportunities for this role to use web 2.0 tools to both maintain their internal client relationships and to share knowledge with the solution end of their training organization (The matrix model I suggest is here). Possibly one happy community? They will often be the initial discussion regarding learning 2.0 and social networking related solutions.

New skills:

• awareness of the benefits and appropriate use of new web 2.0 tools
• recognize genuine opportunities for learning communities and social media
• educate internal clients on the learning advantages of web 2.0 (and shift mindsets away from traditional learning)

Instructional Designers and e-Learning Developers

I’m not a member of the instructional design is dead clan.  But ID pros certainly need to evolve and incorporate more discovery oriented and natural learning benefits of Learning 2.0.  There is no prescription for learning 2.0 designs as there is for e-learning 1.0 which makes some ID’s uncomfortable, but there are certainly principles and best practices that need to be learned by any ID that wants to stay relevant.

Not all are e-learning developers are instructional designers (and visa versa).  With their stronger technical skills, developers need to up their game in the integration of 2.0 and 1.0 technologies to enable more creative solutions.   Rather than defaulting to a rapid development tool for example, e-learning developers need the skill to develop an effective performance support environment, or to use simple tools to create realistic simulations.  Mobile learning is also growing and is an essential developer skill.

New skills:

• building learning environments vs. courses
• design communities of practice (Can communities of practice be designed?)
• build collaboration into formal programs using web 2.0 tools.
• design formal learning that supports communities of practice
• improved simulation design in order to better integrate learning and work.
• design support for non-formal and informal learning solutions
• build interactive elements into collaborative learning 2.0 designs
• simple but creative simulation technologies
• designs for mobile learning

Learning and Organizational Effectiveness Consultants

More than the technology of web 2.0 it’s the methods of informal and social learning that they support that have the most potential to change organizations.  Learning consultants and OD specialist are at the heart of this.  They need to work together more under a common umbrella. My idea of a learning consultant is more akin to the OD or Organizational Learning professional that get inside the organization and facilitate change and learning through workflow re-design, change management efforts and action learning.

New skills:

• action learning
• systems thinking and improvement tools
• building communities of practice
• Senge styled organizational learning
• social media tools to support the above

Learning Unit Directors and Leaders

Learning department leaders need to provide the resources to develop their team in line with the above.  The learning unit is a team of knowledge workers that must model the solutions they are recommending to their internal clients.  Learning unit leaders need the skills to make this happen.  More than providing web 2.0 tools they need to encourage and participate in their own learning communities.  They also need to manage their unit as a system.  Since their team (like most knowledge workers) will know more than they do about learning and performance, they need to learn how to manage the “system” and provide vision and direction more than the manage the “people”.  That means building workflow, measures and structures with their team that produces real results from the unit.

New skills:

• manage the learning organization as a system
• leadership (not micromanagement)
• resources to model, experiment and innovate new learning approaches with in the learning unit.
• web 2.0 tools

e-Learning Suppliers and Vendors

e-Learning vendors (authoring tools, LMS/LCMS, consulting services) have started to add social media tools as wrappers for their web 1.0 offerings but there are few native web 2.0 applications and solutions.   Whether we like it or not, the vendor world plays a big role in shaping technology based learning solutions.

Vendors, suppliers and consultants need new skills in recognizing market opportunities and provide solutions that push the envelop.  Where is the content designed for use within learning communities for example, or a community platform for leadership team development?  People are throwing them together using standard open source or proprietary social media tools but it would be nice to see some platforms/service that offer unique service by skill type the way we see traditional training program offerings.

New skills:

• recognizing new learning 2.0 market opportunities
• solutions and offerings built on web 2.0 values and platforms
• external cross-industry learning communities
• flexible content for role or discipline based communities (ex. Management communities, consulting communities, technical communities etc)

Summary

As Clive Sheppard said, our mission is still improving performance.  Web 2.0 focused discussions like this tend to put technology out front, which is a mistake we’ve made before. Web 2.0 and social media (more importantly the collaboration and sharing they enable) offers us genuine new opportunities for improving performance but they are just one of many important skills needed by learning professionals today.

4. Build a Community of Practice

I’m a fan of Communities of Practice (CoP).  They are environments (usually supported by technology) for groups of people with a common mission or interest to communicate, share learn and build knowledge needed to more effectively solve problems and accomplish work.  Like Performance Support Systems, Communities of Practice are more a concept than a specific tool and they can take many unique configurations. Unlike performance support tools, they are grounded in the communication and interaction between people as they solve shared problems. The primary interaction is between people rather than between people and a structured information system. As a result CoP’s create knowledge as much as they transfer it–an essential feature in effective knowledge work-and they foster informal learning focused on specific problem domains.

CoP’s have been around for as long as human beings have learned and worked together. Communication technologies have simply allowed us to invent environments to structure and enable the knowledge exchange at the heart of the community.  Etienne Wenger identifies some of the benefits of workplace CoPs:

• Communities among practitioners create a direct link between learning and performance, because the same people participate in communities of practice and in teams and business units.

• Communities of practice enable practitioners to take collective responsibility for managing the knowledge they need, recognizing that, given the proper structure, they are in the best position to do this.

• Practitioners can address the tacit and dynamic aspects of knowledge creation and sharing, as well as the more explicit aspects.

• Communities are not limited by formal structures: they create connections among people across organizational and geographic boundaries.

“Designing” Communities of Practice

Can CoPs be “designed” or do they simply “emerge” from participants as they work together?   Certainly, they self-organize and develop their own conventions and culture of interaction, knowledge creation and sharing and in this way they emerge from the hearts and minds of the people participating.  A successful community will not require much management, but their success can be influenced by a well structured community environment and guidance on the behaviours of productive community participation.

Learning consultants cannot “design” the learning outcomes of a CoP; but conversely no CoP can fully design its own learning.  They will self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational objectives.  The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without burdening them with “consulting guidance”.   In these ways Cop’s are both designed and emergent.

Here is a CoP Design Guide I’ve found useful. It’s from the education sector but the pricnicples and process they use are virtually identical to the business context.

Keeping Communities of Practice Alive

Communities of Practice have been around long enough now that we’ve learned how to get them up and running but we’re less adept at keeping them going.  They are notoriously hard to keep active.   CoPs have a natural life-cycle when they are built around time limited projects and they should be free to disassemble when they have served their purpose.  Other CoPs have longer term value and motivation can sometimes wane midcourse.  Here is an article by Richard McDermott with some good ideas for keeping a valuable CoP alive: How to Avoid a Midlife crises in your CoPs.

What Can You Do?

Etienne Wenger, a leading thinker and innovator in the Communities of Practice  provides these actions that various roles in an organization can take to support and optimize the benefits of Communities of Practice:

• Line managers must make sure that people are able to participate in the right communities of practice so they sustain the expertise they need to contribute to projects.

• Knowledge managers must go beyond creating informational repositories that take knowledge to be a “thing,” toward supporting the whole social and technical ecology in which knowledge is retained and created.

• Training departments must move the focus from training initiatives that extract knowledge out of practice to learning initiatives that leverage the learning potential inherent in practice.

• Strategists must find ways to create two-way connections between communities of practice and organizational strategies.

• Change managers must help build new practices and communities to bring about changes that will make a constructive difference.

• Accountants must learn to recognize the capital generated when communities of practice increase an organization’s learning potential.

• Work process designers must devise process improvement systems that thrive on, rather than substitute for, engaged communities of practice.

5. Use Social Media to Facilitate Informal Learning

Ah, social media.  So much has been written about the impact on learning of the tools we now collectively refer to as Web 2.0  that you hardly need more here.  In an earlier post I listed some ways to support organizational learning with Social Media.

However, from the perspective of integrating learning and work, social media is a technical platform (like none before it) for sharing, collaborating and communicating while work is being accomplished.  Social media has been enormously popular in the public sphere but has met with resistance inside organizations so far.  Organizations are still worried that social media is a little too…well…social.  However, what we’ve learned somewhere between learning 1.0 and learning 2.0 is that learning is also well…social…and that the informal networked organization is as important as the formal structure for accomplishing valuable work.

While there are advocates for simply making social media available in organizations to “let the learning happen”,  I prefer a slightly more interventionist approach that uses social media to help project teams, centres of excellence, action learning projects, management teams and other focused networks.  Advocates that focus on the technology are missing the point that the learning lies in the collaboration, discussion, sharing and innovating around a task or problem domain, not in the technology itself.  It lies in the formation and nurturing of communities. I think this is why enterprise software supporting Communities of Practice are moving to more social media oriented technical platforms (Tomoye for example) and social media platforms market themselves as “community” software (Igloo for example).   I think the convergence is good for further integration of learning and working.

Not to put too obvious a point on it, but learning happens while working and social media, more that the one way knowledge management platforms of the recent past, engage employees in the creation, capture and sharing of knowledge in ways that formal learning just can’t match.

Communities of Practice and Social Media at IBM

Here’s a good presentation from IBM that demonstrates the use of social media for Communities of Practice in that company.

Best quote from the video. “Blogging is huge.  Our executives hate it”

Posts in the “10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work” series:

Part 1:

• Strategy 1:  Understand the job
• Strategy 2:  Link Learning to business process
• Strategy 3:  Build a performance support system

Part 2:

• Strategy 4:  Build a community of practice
• Strategy 5:  Use social media to facilitate informal learning

Part 3:

• Strategy 6:  Implement a continuous improvement framework
• Strategy 7:  Use action learning

Part 4:

• Strategy 8:  Use Organizational Learning practices

Part 5:

• Strategy 9:  Design jobs for natural learning
• Strategy 10:  Bring the job to the learning

On Friday at 9:00, I will be presentating a session with Robert Luke (Director Research and Innovation at George Brown College) on the use of social bookmarking in problem-based curriculum design.   We’ll be discussing the project I described here.  Here is the session outline:

Using Social Bookmarking for Problem Based Curriculum Design

Effective problem based learning (PBL) requires a repository of relevant learning and knowledge sources for students to access as they pursue solutions to assigned problems. Most Learning resource repositories are one-directional and limited to instructor defined resources However, the Delicious social bookmarking tool provides a collaborative environment to create a dynamic knowledge base with ongoing contributions by students, instructors, experts and course designers. This session will showcase how George Brown College used Delicious to create an innovative knowledge base to support a new certificate program in Research Commercialization. Attendees will learn the benefits of using Delicious to support problem based (and traditional) learning and the steps to create their own. A demo of the GBC Delicious site will be presented.

Session: Using Social Bookmarking in Problem Based Curriculum Design
Date: Friday, May 22
Time: 9:00 am
Room: 203
Location:
George Brown College
290 Adelaide. St. East
Toronto, ON

Hope to see you there!

Tony Karrer in his e-learning technology blog recently wondered about social networking participation –”it’s different when it’s a natural part of how we work”.  Some insight is provided in a popular article from the McKinsey Quarterly Report.  In Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work, company analysts suggest some tactics that are instructive for encouraging participation in social media for e-learning or in communities of practice.  One of their “six ways” that resonated with my own experience they labeled “What’s in the workflow is what gets used”.  From the report:

What’s in the workflow is what gets used

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work. Earlier generations of technologies, by contrast, often explicitly replaced the tools employees used to accomplish tasks. Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.

Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. The importance of this principle is sometimes masked by short-term success when technologies are unveiled with great fanfare; with the excitement of the launch, contributions seem to flourish. As normal daily workloads pile up, however, the energy and attention surrounding the rollout decline, as does participation. One professional-services firm introduced a wiki-based knowledge-management system, to which employees were expected to contribute, in addition to their daily tasks. Immediately following the launch, a group of enthusiasts used the wikis vigorously, but as time passed they gave the effort less personal time-outside their daily workflow-and participation levels fell”

As enthusiastic as early adopters are with new technologies,  each new wave teaches us that unless they add value to how work get accomplished,  the novelty can wear off quickly.   I think the lesson here for organizational learning and e-learning practitioners is to be careful not to simply roll out social media (for learning or otherwise) and expect widespread adoption similar to what we have seen in the public arena.

Also, management will be making a mistake if they feel they are best suited to make the decision regarding how to best use web 2.0 tools. That decision should be a participatory exercise with end users and it should be grounded in workflow or knowledge flow improvement efforts.  Chances for successful adoption will be much greater when employees analyze and improve their business processes building in web 2.0 tools as integral elements to that workflow.  There will also be lots of trail and error involved.  One of the other interesting findings of the McKinsey report was was intended uses sometimes failed but were replaced by unintended successes that emerged from grass roots use of the tools in pilot projects.