Social Learning For Companies

“Social learning is about extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. It’s about making those learner insights scalable.”
– John Ambrose, Skillsoft.

The Ability To Learn

“The ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage for any organization. Hyper-connected work environments require people with better sense-making, collaboration, and cooperation skills. Social learning plays a significant role in this. Democratic workplaces that foster trust can share knowledge better and faster” – Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche is one of my favourite writers on the topic of Social Learning. His quote about the ability to learn being the only lasting competitive advantage for any organization is a key one that many are looking at. I have the possibility to sign up for lots of courses and read lots of books but I have to admit I learn the most by doing, collaborating with others, and following and interacting with my peers in communities. What about you? What about your company? Do you have opportunities to learn from your work peers even when they are located on other continents?

Categorizing levels of learning and understanding

Benjamin Bloom created a taxonomy for categorizing levels of learning and understanding in the year 1956. It has been revised since then with these verbs “creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering”. Here is that taxonomy visualized with some modern tools that can be used for each level:

“Perpetual Beta is the new reality”

Harold Jarche calls the intersection of collaborative work, social learning and connected leadership as the “perpetual beta”. This sounds like a super way to describe the continual learning that companies of all sizes are undergoing once they start trying to apply social learning to achieve business advantage and also to empower their employees.

Harold Jarche / CC BY-NC-SA 2.5

Empowered and well connected employees are highly valued and efficient because they can use their company internal social media platforms to get answers to questions and can collaborate with highly skilled and experienced people located in different parts of the world.

Intranets – My First Love

I have seen some great recent examples of this in my own company over the years but it all started for me in this area with Intranets created using FrontPage way back in 1997. I created the first central Intranet for Thorn Lighting and then found that like minded colleagues who I had never met were connecting their local experimental Intranets to mine. This created a network that kept growing, and became more and more useful for the salesforce. They kept dialling in after work using their modems from their homes. I learnt a lot from those days especially about the value of connected relationships with staff that I would never have known about if it was not for those early connected Intranets.

Learning companies

A blog I recommended for further reading is Wirearchy by Jon Husband. Here is a quote from Jon that I feel expresses the way forward quite well.. “Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done. The only way to deal with ongoing change is to create and sustain effective conversations – with your customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone else. Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will work from here on out. The structure, tools and culture of organizations will have to honour this fact. There’s no other way it’s going to work.”. Looking back at my humble Intranet days using my Hayes modem and Frontpage 97 (with those lovely FrontPage extensions) the quote from Jon Husband seems very appropriate for the way ahead. What do you think?

Social learning case study – Connect.BASF

I really like this case study from BASF. I learned a lot about the success factors that they found while rolling out their award winning enterprise social network which now has over 35,000 connected employees.

These are some of the sections that they have built:

Corporate initiatives and corporate units (Communities of Engagement).
These communities are founded by the organization itself to facilitate dialog with employees.
Work-groups and project teams (Communities of Practice).
These communities are set up by organizational units to serve the organization. The main thrust is collaboration.
Social networking groups (Communities of Interest).
Communities are set up by employees wishing to network with like-minded people.
Expert networks and professional groups (Communities of Expertise).
Communities of Expertise are set up by employees to serve the organization. Communities of this kind exist in a variety of areas, including controlling, communication and project management.

Read more about this intriguing example of social learning in a large company, which started out small using a pilot.

Social Learning – In summary

“No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is life in perpetual Beta. Get used to it. Preparing for this will require time, social learning, and management support” – Harold Jarche