Six Obstacles to Building Communities in Organizations

Rachel Happe begins her latest post, 10 Trends for the Future of Communities, with a comprehensive description of the various intersecting and intermingling streams and characteristics that inform communities, and I am quoting her below:

Communities sit at the intersection of a number of trends; social media, digital transformation, a generational shift to prioritize purposeful work, the future of work, change management, leadership and social learning.   

This is one of the most inclusive descriptions that captures the various threads and reasons for building communities in organizations. Yet, this is where organizations are struggling. In this post, I want to explore a few reasons for this struggle. I have written before about the fallibility of trying to have social learning as a bolt on strategy, on the role of social technology as an avenue for building communities in organizations, and the importance of building communities to facilitate emergent learning. 

The role of a Community Manager is becoming well-established with communities being perceived as platforms that have the potential to reduce the cost of communication, bridge organizational silos, facilitate cross-team conversations thus creating opportunities for innovation, knowledge transfer, expertise location, and more. However, despite of the various tangible and intangible benefits of communities, organizations are in reality discovering that establishing thriving communities and building a social business is challenging on various fronts, calling into question some of the very fundamental principles and frameworks on which organizations have been created. Here are some of the challenges:

1. Proliferating Platforms - Organizations, especially large, globally distributed organizations suffer from what I call the "unconscious silo syndrome". Most often, the inadvertent unawareness of what is happening in the rest of the organization give managers, decision-makers and other employees a feeling that "we are the new age torchbearers" and once it works in this team/project/business function, the initiative can be taken to the rest of the organization for an enterprise-wide implementation. Needless to say, it is human for all to want a bit of fame that comes with being the trendsetter and a possible organizational visionary. In reality, this leads to pockets of experimentation and duplication of effort without a holistic view of or alignment with the organizational strategy and business goals. The result is of course a less than desirable state of platform overdose, and an amplification of the offline silos onto a now online medium.

2. The "Bottom-Up" Approach - Many organizations tread on the conservative and cautious side and stay away from a big-bang launch for various reasons including skepticism at the leadership level, lack of skills in putting together a strategy for community building and management, fear of investing too much time and money without a clear idea of the intended results, and so on. The general approach usually adopted is to put in place a platform, do a bit of word-of-mouth marketing, and hope that people will start conversing and engaging on the platform. The initial few weeks, or even months, may see some traction, but it is usually scattered, disconnected and directionless. Very soon the enthusiasm of the initial few die down, the platform either becomes a ghost town or a land of thousand flowers and the expected outcome of communities and collaboration do not materialize. As Andrew McAfee, et al. highlight in their book Leading Digital...:

"...we saw no successful transformation happening bottom-up. Instead, executives in every Digital Master steered the transformation through strong top-down leadership: setting direction, building momentum, and ensuring that the company follows through." 

3. Policy-Driven Paralysis - When a decision is made to embark on a community and collaboration journey on the duly selected enterprise collaboration platform, organizations become suddenly fearful of all the possibilities of information leakage, open expression of sentiments by irate employees, sharing of sensitive and politically incorrect information, and so on. The reaction is to begin by creating guidelines and policies trying to encapsulate and articulate everything that employees cannot and should not do on the platform. The result is anything but inspiring or conducive to open collaboration. It is akin to tying people up in chains and then expecting them to do a tango. IMHO, it is time to let go and show more trust in the very employees that the organization has selected through well-defined recruitment and interviewing processes. 

4. Collaboration Conundrum - While we keep hearing the impending death knell of the bell curve, the truth is that a large percentage of organizations still abide by it for various reasons - lack of another system, familiarity syndrome, alignment of business and operational processes, management capability (or lack thereof in handling a new way of appraisal), HR and leadership lethargy, and more. The result is the creation of a tension between a competitive and a collaborative mindset. To be absolutely honest, it is very hard to be collaborative and share openly if an employee knows that s/he will be judged and measured against their peers when the appraisal time comes around. It is difficult for a manager to justify and facilitate open collaboration, and then do a rank and yank to fit a designated set of high-performers in the bell curve. And woe betide the manager who has too many high-performers and collaborators in his/her team. This false system of forced ranking eliminates collaboration, creates a sense of scarcity over abundance (be it for a specific rating or that prized project), and turns team members into opponents. Bye bye communities and collaboration!

5. Leadership Detachment - Many a times, something as critical as the building of a collaborative culture and thriving communities are left to the HR and L&D departments to drive. It is posited as "let's see if collaboration & social business works because everyone is talking about it". Senior leaders and C-suite members feel they are too time constrained to dabble in activities like communities when issues of graver import like shareholder profit, top line and bottom line figures, M&A's are awaiting their attention. However, the reality today is that without a connected, collaborative and resilient organization, all other strategy is likely to fail. Times of intense change and ambiguity as we are living in today demands collaboration and a strong leadership who will walk the talk. 

6. Dearth of Digital Skills - It is not that people do not know how to tweet or post pictures on Facebook or create a Pinterest board. IMHO, digital skills go beyond the common activities that almost everyone with a smart phone can indulge in today. Digital skills are closely related to a digital mindset, which I define as "the ability to understand the power of technology to democratize, scale and speed up every form of interaction and action." Very often, organizations -- this includes employees, leaders, managers, and everyone comprising the ecosystem -- lack this inherent capability of using technology to facilitate the building of PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and communities. Digital skills include capabilities like working out loud, pattern sensing, sharing and connecting openly to develop a rich and diverse PLN, collaborating with a defined purpose, using technology with an awareness of its potential to promote self-driven learning, democratization of information, and so on. This mindset requires a degree of comfort with ambiguity, willingness to make mistakes, adopting a beginner's perspective, welcoming of diversity, and a willingness to learn from all possible sources. 

Uberizing Organizational Learning – Thinking Beyond Courses

Designing courses is passé! In a world where the shelf-life of knowledge and skills are rapidly shrinking, where best practices of yore yield increasingly little or no return on investment, where exceptions are the norm, and constant change and flux the new normal, designing set courses using SME-defined content is like trying to build a dam to rein in the surging waves of a tumultuous ocean. We have to think agile, instant, accessible, contextual, micro-sized, real time… We need to uberize organizational learning.

“Uberization” has taken off as the new term that according to me has come to stand for – disruption, innovation, lean operating model, harnessing of the affordances of the sharing economy, and a hyper-connected world driven by imagination and creativity where everything is a mobile-click away – including learning. I agree that’s a string of nouns and adjectives and sounds like I have thrown together a set of buzz words. But it’s not. If we do a bit of Googling, we’ll see the term cropping up in every conceivable context with posts talking about Let’s Uberize the Entire Economy to The Uberization of Money.

I am taking uberization more as a concept that encapsulates the characteristics listed above and, IMHO, L&D has a lot to learn from this. The concept of uberization is shaped “by combining smart-phone connectivity with voluminous real-time data on supply and demand”. Let’s pause a bit and think what this would mean to the L&D world in any organization. I’m not getting into the economics of how Uber operates; however, it is worthwhile to remember in the L&D context that Uber owns no “assets”. Agility and pull lie at the heart of uberization. Users – with a single tap on the app – can get a ride. Uber taps into existing resources providing people – both the suppliers and the buyers – with a platform to connect. The economy of “surge pricing” defines the cost. Whether that is good or bad is beyond the purview of this post. So, what do I mean when I talk about uberizing workplace learning? And what role does L&D play in the process?

Before I delve into some of the characteristics of uberization that we can extrapolate to workplace learning, here’s a few guidelines to keep in mind wrt expectations from L&D. I increasingly see a trend where we’ll have to: 

1. Do more with less – less time, less resources, less funding 
2. Deliver customized, just-in-time, easily accessible learning interventions and support on a continuous basis 
3. Talk business outcomes and business performance, not learning 
4. Assess and prepare the organization for skills needed in a VUCA world influenced by the forces of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud 
5. Take a consultant’s approach as opposed to that of an order taker 
6. Be the torchbearers for the new skills in the workplace (digital skills for the networked era) 
7. Partner with leadership to build an agile and continuously learning organization 
8. Tap into available resources and enable network to do the work 
9. Build and manage communities to harness the organizational hive mind 
10. Develop a learner’s mind – curious, exploratory, informed by a growth mindset

None of these will happen if we continue to sit in our isolated ivory towers designing courses, managing training calendars and count the number of days of training we have delivered to each employee. Business can and will ask, “So what?” We have to get out there, get our hands dirty, talk to business, read the company’s Annual Report, and figure out what is happening on the business front. I wonder how many L&D folks go through Annual Reports and Balance Sheets; however, this is where the crux of business can be understood. And whatever impacts business should and must impact how we function. Against this backdrop, technology is providing us with an opportunity to re-imagine and redefine workplace learning and our role as business partners, thought leaders, and change agents.  

Here are a few things we can start doing immediately using Uber as inspiration, if we are not on the path already.

1. Take a mobile-first approach – Just as a ride is a tap away on the Uber mobile app, make learning just as accessible and instant. Users are increasingly expecting all interactions to happen via their mobile devices. Learning is no exception. Just as the Uber app allows a user to track the route, a learning app should allow the users/learners to see their learning roadmap personalized to their role and growth path. L&D’s focus needs to shift from designing one-size fits all courses to consulting with individual learners, their managers and HR, and carving out learning roadmaps for them. By making what matters to employees available on mobile devices of their choice, we can remove multiple barriers and enable them to pull what they need to traverse their learning journey. We can take a leaf our of platforms like Udemy or Coursera that offers a gamut of courses – all accessible via an app. Today’s workers expect a similar integrated experience – the freedom to pick and choose what they want to learn, where and when.
2. Build communities – We are in the midst of the sharing economy which is all about open data, user-generated content, crowd-sourcing, shared value co-creation, collaboration, and more. It is no longer possible or feasible – in the face of unforeseen change – for L&D to formally design and develop all that will be needed to keep an organization at the cutting edge. It’s time to acknowledge that the learners are active participants in the system, and not just consumers of courses. L&D must move to becoming facilitators and enablers in a sharing economy and provide the right technology, tools and support necessary to allow users to collaboratively co-create value. This will not only enable organizations to tap into the collective wisdom of the crowd but will also move the organization towards becoming a truly learning org. People are at the heart of a sharing economy, and people are at the heart of a community. Organizations can no longer hope to thrive in a VUCA world without enabling the coming together of their people. I have written extensively about building communities in organizations in earlier posts here and here and here, and will continue to explore this theme further this year. The more I reflect, the more I strongly feel that the sustainability of an organization depends on giving up control and letting the network do the work. This fundamental principle lies at the heart of the success of Uber as well. L&D and the organization’s role will be to provide a highly-efficient sharing system and encourage participation. This calls for a radically different kind of thinking where the managers, leaders, L&D and HR – the gatekeepers of organizational resources including knowledge – collectively move over to the role of facilitators who inspire and empower open sharing, conversations, co-creation, and cooperation.
3. Curate from existing sources – Tap into MOOCs, and other existing OERs. L&D needs to don the curator’s hat – a critical 21^st Century skill – that requires an ability to seek, sense and share (Harold Jarche’s PKM model) relevant content for a defined target audience. Note that content creation – so far the forte of most L&D folks – is not a part of this. However, curation requires an even greater effort at creativity and an ability to connect the dots, make sense of disparate information, and pull these together to form a cohesive whole. It is not an easy skill to build and requires constant honing, deep diving into the designated area of focus, talking to and following experts in the field, using appropriate filtering mechanism to remove the chaff from the wheat, and then presenting the curated content in a format that will appeal to the end user. Moving from content creation to content curation requires Uber-like thinking – create no asset, tap into networks, connect the dots. I also liken it to developing a service-mindset over a product-mindset.
4. Build a culture of feedback – Uber relies heavily on the ratings provided by users as well as the drivers. This mutual rating system ensures that the standard is maintained more effectively than any policing or management could do. L&D can definitely apply this to how learners/employees rate their experiences of the learning, of the engagement on the community, and encourage feedback. A culture of feedback encourages transparency, highlights inefficiencies, and make improvements an ongoing process. However, organizations with the help of L&D will have to define what constitutes feedback as opposed to baseless criticism, rants, and complaints. Genuine feedback comes with the intent to help improve, provide insight, and either reaffirms a practice or encourages change. The overarching intention is to make better. The ability to give and receive feedback is another critical skill we need to develop to thrive in a world in flux.
5. Make it an ongoing effort – Uberization takes away the comfort of creating a one-time product (a course), launching it, and moving on to repeat the process. Uberization comes with a service-mindset. It is an ongoing effort that should eventually become the new way of doing things. It requires a constant scanning of the ecosystem – within as well as without, and gauging how external changes can impact the organization ranging from the need to re-skill existing workforce to recruiting scarce talent.

In summary, the world of L&D has dramatically changed. Just as the rules of business and leadership have changed in the networked era, so has the rules for how to enable employees to deliver with efficacy. The L&D department can no longer sit in an isolated bubble designing courses for skills that are fast becoming redundant. It is time to build an entirely new set of skills in oneself as well as in the workforce.    

My Top 11 Most-Read Posts of 2015!

Sometimes it is the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination! ~ Drake 

As the year draws to a close, I want to wish all my readers a joyful, learning filled, wondrous 2016! And I take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to all who kept inspiring me to write, who continued to support me, and kept me on my learning journey. The year's end always makes us reflective. In keeping with the mood of the day, I thought I would make a list of the posts that garnered the most views and comments and shares this year before moving on to write a new one. Maybe, I should keep the new one for the first day of the new year. 

Even as I scrolled through my posts, I realized that somewhere along my blogging journey, I have shifted from a pure L&D focus to a more holistic organizational learning and social business focus. I am going to focus more on the latter in the coming year...I'm researching and reading up books, articles, and blogs related to social business, complexity science, systems thinking, disruptive technology and overall organizational development. I'll continue to use my blog as my platform for learning, sharing, reflecting, and ideating. 

Here's the list of the top 10...I hope you will find it useful:

• Integrating Social Learning in the Workplace - The post discusses some of the fundamental requirements--both culturally and strategically--that an organization must take into consideration when planning to integrate social learning in the workplace learning blend. 
• Social Learning Cannot be a Bolt-On Strategy - This post, a continuation of the earlier one, highlights some of the key strategic and leadership requirements necessary to make collaboration and sharing a success in an organization. Trust-based collaboration--in turn--leads to the building of an innovative and learning organization. 
• Working Out Loud 101: Some Thoughts - Dion Hinchcliffe, in his Today's Critical Digital Workforce Skills identifies Working Out Loud as one of the key skills. My post designed like an FAQ attempts to address some of the fundamental challenges people face when asked to begin practicing working out loud to share and collaborate. 
• 7 Strategies to Facilitate Working Out Loud - I firmly believe that working out loud will increasingly become a valued skill that will enable teams to stay connected and work together effectively despite the barriers of location and time zones. It will help a distributed workforce and a geographically dispersed organization to bridge silos and tap into the tacit knowledge of a cognitively and culturally diverse workforce leading to a more innovative and resilient organization. This post outlines some of the key strategies that can enable the culture of working out loud in an organization. 
• Workplace Learning in a World Beyond Automation - This post was written in response to an HBR article called Beyond Automation (a must read) that describes the advent of automation through the ages, and talks about the rise of smart machines. My post is an attempt to extend this thinking into the workplace and the impact it is likely to have on the nature of work, learning and human relationships as we move towards 2020. Will the world be radically different from the one we inhabit today? Will robots be our colleagues? How will this impact workplace learning, HR policies, and the nature of the organization?
• Social Technology, Community Management, and Organizational Development - Written in response to a diagram that Dion Hinchcliffe (yes, he's my online guru for all things social business) had created to show how Technology and Business are Co-evolving into the Future Organization, I have highlighted the role of technology in building communities in organizations. I've gone on to discuss how communities will change the nature of organizations and organizational learning. This is an area I intend to further deep-dive into, explore and write about in 2016. I believe that communities are cornerstones of social businesses and that will be my key area of focus in the coming year. 

• "Digital Mindset": What is it All About? - This post explores what it means to have a digital mindset going beyond mere digital and tech savvy to emphasize characteristics like agility, openness, trust, respect for diversity and comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty. This is one of my personal favorites and again an area I will delve into more often in 2016. 
• The Top 6 Things Organizations Must Do to Enable Emergent Learning - An emergent and VUCA world calls for an emergent learning strategy. This post highlights some of that at a high level. I will be writing more about emergent learning in the context of organizational learning and rising complexity in 2016.
• Becoming a Social Business: Beyond Culture Change - While the corporate world is abuzz with "social learning," "social business" and all things "social", I have tried to reflect upon and unravel some of the common terms and phrases typically associated with organizations that impact our discourse on social. The very words we use could be influencing and propagating certain deeply-rooted organizational practices that may prove counter-productive to the building of a culture conducive to facilitating a social business. 
• Demystifying Working Out Loud - I often have people asking me about the practices involved in working out loud and what do they imply. This post is a short attempt to highlight what it is and also what working out loud is not. 
• L&D's Role in a Purpose-Driven Workplace - I do believe that organizations will no longer be able to attract or retain valuable and talented employees by just focusing on shareholders' value increase. They will have to articulate a purpose and the intention of a greater social good to thrive in today's evolving and complex economy. The current and coming generation are likely to enter the workplace with a different set of values that will call for a different approach, and possibly a redefinition of what an organization implies.  

I hope you enjoy reading the posts. I'd love to dialogue with you and hear different perspectives. 

The Top Six Things Organizations Must Do to Enable Emergent Learning

“…changes in mindset are more important than changes in hardware or software.”

~Steve Denning

What is common across the learning modes and methods mentioned? 

• Social learning via an enterprise collaboration platform 
• Mobile enabled learning accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device of the user’s choice 
• MOOCs which straddle the line between social learning and e-learning with learner communities

While an organization can facilitate these, the onus lies with the users/learners. These are essentially “pull” and collaborative learning modes and cannot be imposed. These forms often intersect with one another, and are used in various combinations depending on the organization’s need, users’ comfort and the capabilities required to design the ecosystem. Having said that, a major percentage of organizations today are striving to put in place one or more of the above-mentioned modes and tools of learning. This is leading to a shift in the role of the L&D department – from managers and disseminators of formally designed programs to facilitators and enablers of collaboration and communities. I have written about the new skills that L&D and HR needs to make this transition in my posts here and here. In this post, I am going to explore six key requirements necessary from an organizational and leadership standpoints to make collaborative and emergent learning work. But first, 

What is emergent learning?

Emergent Learning is a condition and an outcome of organizational culture, strategy and purpose. 

It arises out of a combination of networked leadership, HR and L&D efforts, and meaningful work. It leverages the powers of networks and social platforms, and the affordances of mobile and cloud to build an interconnected and continuously learning organization. When fully realized and supported, emergent learning provides autonomy, mastery and purpose to learners and agility, adaptability and resilience to organizations. It empowers learners to build their personal learning networks (PLN) and personal knowledge management (PKM) by leveraging technology to connect a distributed and diverse workforce. Emergent learning by definition takes place in the workflow; it is always contextual, collaborative, and beyond the norms of formal learning. Emergent learning cuts across formal organizational structures and siloes and brings out the inherent tacit knowledge and ongoing collective experience building a shared journey for all concerned. In this context, it is important to remember that technology is an enabler, an amplifier and connector. It is there solely to serve the purpose of the users, to empower them to explore and engage.

Thus,

Emergent learning = Nurturing Evolving Human Potential by giving individuals the power to learn the way they want to.

When any organization or institution shifts from a hierarchical, top-down mode to a horizontal, peer- and user-driven one – be it in management or learning – culture plays a huge role in the success or otherwise of the endeavor. “The DNA of “peer trust” is built on opposite characteristics – micro, bottom-up, decentralized, flowing and personal” (The Changing Rules of Trust in the Digital Age). This is perhaps the biggest mind shift that organizations have to make in the digital era and to facilitate an environment of continuous learning. While the pace of change and the need for constant re-skilling has adeptly shifted the onus of learning away from institutions to individuals, this comes with a new set of responsibility and change in mindset. IMHO, these are the six key changes organizations need to make to enable emergent learning. 

1. Shift from networks to communities. The affordances of ubiquitous connectivity, pervasive mobility and cloud, and the prevalence of social media ensure that organizations today are connected. However, facilitating networks is not enough albeit it’s the necessary precursor to building communities. As Henry Mintzberg points out in the HBR article, We Need Both Networks and Communities. “At the organizational level, … effective companies function as communities of human beings, not collections of human resources.” The article resonates with my belief that organizations today must foster trust-based peer communities to encourage collaboration and cooperation. It is in communities that knowledge is exchanged and challenges solved. 
2. Give up hierarchical, command and control mindset. While we are wont to blame the management models of the Industrial Era and their continuing prevalence today for the lack of trust and transparency we see in many/most organizations, we have to understand that this model served its purpose when scalable efficiency and productivity were the desired outcome. Today in the face of rapid change and technological evolution, this same model is failing us; it’s becoming a roadblock to seamless collaboration and flow of information. Managers schooled in the hierarchical system find it difficult to give up control. Even the physical design of organizations (although many are changing) with its corner offices, and other visible symbols of hierarchy reinforce the order. It’s not enough to espouse a belief in an open culture; it requires redefining the way leadership functions and their external manifestations. 
3. Make employee engagement an outcome, not the goal. IMHO, it’s an organization fallacy to make employee engagement the goal. Employee engagement is not a set of isolated and random activities. It is an outcome of a number of collective activities, organization culture and overall employee experience. These experiences begin even before an employee joins an organization and continues till the time they leave, and even thereafter in the firm of alumni communities. Every step of an employee’s journey wrt the organization from the interview process to project allocation to interactions with management and peers adds up to define the culture which in turn drives employee engagement or lack thereof. Emergent learning is a key outcome of employee engagement. Engaged employees feel valued and respected; this leads them to collaborate and cooperate in the interest of the organization as well as their own development. Disengaged employees neither learn nor share. 
4. Make the purpose bigger than shareholder value creation. In the new world, shareholders’ value will continue to exist but not as a primary driver for organizations that seek to attract, retain and build a community of talented individuals or make an impact on the world. An authentic and purpose-driven organization that is seen to give back to society is more likely to attract and retain employees. Purpose and shared value creation are strong drivers of learning inspiring people to share and collaborate towards the achievement of a bigger vision. 
5. Stop viewing individuals as replaceable resources. Even today, well into the second decade of the knowledge era and the creative economy, organizations still treat individuals as resources. While no one would clear an interview if they said, “I am just like everyone else, and have no unique qualities,” it is precisely what organizations strive to do once you are in. Kill the uniqueness and make one fit a mold. And then perversely complain that people are not creative, innovative, or using their brains. Basically, it’s a dichotomy! What organizations need and want are being fundamentally curbed by their very systems and processes created to uphold uniformity, predictability, and homogeneity. The leaders and managers are as much a victim of the system as the employees. The systems and processes established 200 years ago were created to augment human brawn with machines. They are ill-equipped to support a world that revolves around the uniqueness of the human brain. It calls for transformational leadership and cultural mind-shift. Individuals treated like replaceable cogs will behave like cogs; not self-driven learners. 
6. Celebrate diversity in all aspects – cognitive and otherwise. Learning and insight take place when diverse thoughts and ideas collide. “I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me,” Dudley Malone had famously said. And it is partially at least true. Diversity and inclusion cannot only be a part of HR policy anymore; it is necessary for the very survival of organizations as we enter the VUCA world. Emergent learning cannot happen unless diverse ideas and experiences find a place to converge and come together. Hence, the communities that organizations facilitate – online or offline -- should consciously enable the coming together of diverse individuals.  

All of these feel like massive changes and they are. I’ll go a step further and say that collectively put together, these moves lead to transformation. Change is primarily tactical, process-driven with a known outcome that one drives toward. Transformation is revolutionary! It takes us from the known to the unknown in the nature of an explorer embarking on a journey of discovery in a bid to find a new world. Here’s a telling excerpt from an HBR article that I’ll end with:

“Change management” means implementing finite initiatives, which may or may not cut across the organization. The focus is on executing a well-defined shift in the way things work.

…

Transformation is another animal altogether. Unlike change management, it doesn’t focus on a few discrete, well-defined shifts, but rather on a portfolio of initiatives, which are interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change — but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. It’s much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It entails much higher risk. And even if successful change management leads to the execution of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the overall transformation could still fail.” We Still Don’t Know the Different between Change and Transformation

Demystifying Working Out Loud

“When people leverage collaboration platforms to contribute and to build relationships, that appeals to their intrinsic motivators of autonomy, mastery, and relatedness.” ~ Working Out Loud-Better for You; Better for the Firm

Working out loud has been steadily gaining popularity and has become a topic of conversation on many forums including the Facebook community of the same name. In the post 5 Gifts for the HR Department, John Stepper describes working out loud as a “different kind of talent program” writing, “as more employees work out loud, more of their work is visible along with public feedback on it”. Dion Hinchcliffe in What Are the Required Skills for Today’s Digital Workforce?, mentions working out loud as one of the “genuinely transformative new digital skills”, and as seen in the diagram below, it heads the list of critical skills for a digital workforce.

I have been writing about working out loud as a practice for some time now. Here are some of my older posts: Working Out Loud 101, 7 Strategies to Facilitate Working Out Loud, and Working Out Loud: Using the Tools We Already Have. In this post, I want to demystify working out loud and highlight the organizational as well as personal growth that accrues from the practice. I am a huge believer of the practice because I have experienced the effect first hand. It has helped me to develop my personal learning network (PLN) and enabled my PKM. However, individuals for whom it’s a seemingly new way of working are still beset by doubts, and some may even express outright skepticism. Given this context, I have tried to explain what #wol entails for those like me who might be trying to spread the approach, believe in the fundamental philosophy of transparency and open work, and wish to empower everyone with a simple yet powerful learning tool for self-driven learning.

First let me clarify what working out loud is NOT… It is not any of the descriptors given below:

• A tool/methodology to boast about oneself

•  A mindset that can stem from selfish interests

• An approach that implies networking for personal benefits

•  A methodology that can flourish under very controlling and hierarchical organizations

• A process to be mandated by management/supervisors/organizations with defined rules

I’m going to take a step back and examine the world we live in today and how the notion of work has changed. 

1. Work has become location agnostic; workplace is no longer defined by a brick and mortar building 
2. The 9:00 am to 5:00 pm notion of work is all but vanishing, at least for the knowledge workers 
3. The workforce today is not only globally distributed but also contingent giving rise to the notion of the extended enterprise 
4. The workforce is ubiquitously connected, networked, and mobile 
5. The ecosystem we operate in is volatile with rising complexity & ambiguity – the quintessential VUCA world 
6. Five generations are working side-by-side (often virtually) 
7. The baby boomers are retiring taking their tacit knowledge and experience with them 
8. We live in an age of information abundance but lacking in insight and wisdom; it is almost impossible to make sense of it as an individual 
9. Exceptions are the norms; making sense of exceptions require a coming together of cognitively diverse individuals 
10. Disruptive business models are upending traditional org structures

Demystifying #WOL: Some questions I have encountered when discussing working out loud in forums & conferences or with colleagues:

Q. Does working out loud need digital technology in the form of an online platform or tool?

Fundamentally, one doesn’t need any tool to practice working out loud. However, in an era of distributed, dispersed and global workforce, an online platform becomes a necessary connector and amplifier. It is perfectly possible to share one’s experience over a “lunch & learn” session; however, if that session can also be aired on Hangout, the impact is amplified tenfold. I would say that a platform that facilitates easy and seamless interaction, forming of groups and threads, a powerful search mechanism and a way to aggregate conversations across topics (#) would be ideal for working out loud effectively.

Q. Why should I work out loud when my immediate team sits right next to me?

Organizational silos form because we don’t know what the teams across the hallway are working on leave alone being aware of what other business units and divisions are doing. Thus not only do we lose out on diverse inputs and knowledge, we also proverbially reinvent the wheel many times over and feed into systemic inefficiency. An organization that shares openly –successes and failures, learnings and insights, explicit and tacit knowledge – learns faster, builds an ambient awareness and paves the road for serendipity. The practice of working out loud across and beyond the borders of a conventional org chart leads to a much higher probability of expertise location, talent discovery, innovation, cross-pollination of ideas, and a resilient and constantly learning organization. It is an excellent method for bridging those very gaps and silos – the white spaces – between the defined boxes of the org chart. To illustrate this, I have slightly modified Dion Hinchcliffe’s diagram (see below) to show how the process of #wol can benefit all of us – employees as well as the organization.

Q. It’s not natural for me to post whatever I want to say or think online. What are some of the compelling reasons that will make me do so?

Given this VUCA world, it is imperative for and incumbent on all of us to remain learning agile and relevant. A distributed workforce requires a digital platform for connect. When we refuse to acknowledge that the fundamental paradigms that defined organizations of yore have changed, we kill our chances of personal development and growth by continuing to operate in silos and with people who are cognitively aligned. We run the risk of suffering from a “frog in the well” syndrome and fail to see signs and symptoms of change. Today’s work requires us to collaborate with folks we have never met, often from the other side of the world. These call for an adoption of some fundamental digital skills of which #wol is one.

However, it is not all gloom and doom! While the practice may seem novel, it actually taps into the basic human nature of sharing, learning and collaborating – aspects of humanity that traditional organizations suppressed in the name of efficiency, economy of scale and productivity. What working out loud requires is for us to collectively go back to the days when we swapped stories sitting around a fire, the only difference being that the fire has been replaced by a participative medium like a social collaboration platform, communities of diverse individuals and a global mindshare. Just as we would not have survived as a species had our ancestors not swapped those early stories, our survival and relevancy as individuals and organizations today may well be threatened if we fail to tap into the wider network of diverse and global intelligence. A complex world requires collaborative and cooperative problem solving.

Q. I deal with sensitive information and data. Why should I post it for all to see?

First of all, the definition of sensitive information is changing as organizations morph from complete control and hierarchy into more flatter and networked organizations. Having said that, there may well be data like employees personal information that must be protected. Working out loud does not imply exposing sensitive information. #WOL is a lightweight way of doing open work, i.e., sharing one’s learning, asking questions, sharing resources you may have found useful and hope others will too. It is based on the fundamental principles of generosity, a growth mindset, leadership and a desire to build a purposeful network. The latter is one of the most profound and meaningful outcome of generously working out loud. Consistent practice leads to a network that is open, diverse and deep. The image below (came across it via the Facebook Working Out Loud community) captures these core characteristics succinctly and beautifully.

Q. I barely have time to finish my tasks; when will I share and work out loud?

Working out loud is not an extra activity we do over and above our regular work. It is how work will get done as digitization and globalization become driving forces. On an average we send out more than 30 mails in a day and receive ten times that number. If we pause to think, how many of those mails are in search of that elusive information, that particular PowerPoint presentation or that one person we know who has experience in the current problem scenario. The same ask posted on an open network is ten times more likely to throw up more relevant information at a much faster pace, reduce all the back and forth, and also help us to locate that expertise much more quickly. This reduced time and cost of coordination that #wol facilitates is one of the key drivers to practice the approach. We need it more than ever now – because we don’t have time. It is one of the ways to save us those precious hours while also building our network and meta-learning skills for the digital world.

Q. How will working out loud impact my professional development?

Working out loud enables us to practice and hone skills like reflection, synthesis, evaluation, online collaboration, co-creation and so on. No one will argue that these are invaluable meta-learning skills – especially in an era characterized by complexity and exceptions. Working out loud not only helps us to make our work visible to others in a way that they can find useful, it also helps us to build crucial skills. By sharing openly, we demonstrate generosity that invites others to share with us thus building a virtual cycle of giving and learning together. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the practice of #wol lays the foundation for other skills depicted in the diagram on top – skills like building one’s PLN, becoming adept at digital collaboration and letting the network do the work. The diagram below summarizes the different ways that working out loud manifests itself.

  

Integrating Social Learning in the Workplace

I have been writing about social learning and its related concepts – communities of practices, working out loud and skills for the networked world for quite some time now. Social learning has become a buzzword in the workplace learning space, and every other organization is claiming to have “social learning” as a part of the mix. The catch is that “social learning” cannot just be implemented or enforced. One cannot inset social learning in the training calendar and feel happy about it. It has to be integrated into the culture and the organizational way of working and being. And therein lies the problem.

This post focuses on the challenges organizations face when attempting to integrate social learning and synthesizes some of the key concerns. Social learning is much more a cultural outcome than a process or a program to be followed. Organizations are fairly adept at implementing training programs, providing LMS access and checking for completion. However, social learning neither has a completion criteria nor can it be enforced. “Social learning” cannot be assigned as one would a course or a module. Nor can one be sent off to attend a class on social learning. So, social learning continues to loom like a specter over L&D’s head, who are usually given the dictate of implementing it.

On the face of it, social learning is or at least should be the easiest thing to implement in the workplace. Don’t we always turn to our colleagues when we are stuck? Don’t we WhatsApp or message our not co-located peers for the latest proposal, solution, client inputs? Then, why does social learning become the proverbial stumbling block on every L&D team’s radar?

It is primarily because of the way our organizations are structured and operate. The operational as well as the cultural norms of a majority of our organizations date back to the days of Taylor when standardization was a much sought after aspect to bring about efficiency, reduce errors and shorten turnaround time. Organizations thrived on predictability, best practices, efficiency and repeatability. 

Now, fast forward to the 21^st Century bombarded by shifts in technology, changing nature of work and an evolving workplace. The history of outsourcing to off-shoring to automation is now well known. However, while technology advanced forcing us to work differently, the human mindset and the accompanying organizational management models did not. The evolution of the mind takes years, and we got stuck in a time warp. Organizations like Kodak, Borders and Blockbuster faded into irrelevance. Those who could embrace this technological onslaught thrived, and their names are household words today. Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, Pandora… .

How is this change related to social learning? In a profound and almost philosophical way. History tells us that social learning has been the “only” way people learned in the past. The only technology then available was the “fire” built outside caves and other such places where the nomadic hunters of yore gathered at the end of the day to share stories. Cave paintings are further proof of the visual skills and the social nature of learning. People wanted to share what they knew in various forms. Social learning is not a 21^st century invention. Vygotsky and Bandura’s theories dating back to the 1970’s explain the social nature of learning in a great deal of detail. The fundamental pillars of social learning have always been trust and a willingness to share and cooperate.

What we have lost today are precisely the art of communicating with openness and trust. Cooperation and collaboration to use Harold Jarche’s words. And this takes us back to Taylor, command and control, hierarchy, and the other well-known and esteemed pillars of modern day management. In an effort to mechanize processes and capitalize on efficiency, the practices and principles that led to the rise of Industrial Age organizations successfully killed the natural instincts of human beings – to learn, to share, and to cooperate.

By propagating the treatment of individuals as replaceable cogs, by reducing their humanity to naught, organizations of that era thrived by de-humanizing the human. However, this “efficiency” came at a price. The side effects of hierarchy and top down management – obsolete principles, hunger for power and unnatural competitiveness – desensitized the organizations. This has led to mistrust, cheating, shirking. Which in turn led to a further tightening of the so-called processes, bureaucratic systems and managerial oversight. Knowledge hoarding became one of the means of accumulating power and staying in control. Skills were no longer freely shared. “Social” became a bad word within the walls of the serious, process-oriented, sanitized interiors of the corporate world.

Then came the 21^st century with its dramatic shifts and trends. The world has shifted and we are in the midst of the Creative Economy, and organizations realize that they are ill-prepared to face this change. Predictability gave way to complexity and often, chaos. The five forces in the diagram below turned the old order upside down.

Suddenly, the old order is no longer functioning as well as they had done. Best practices no longer suffice. Exceptions and novel challenges are the norm. There is no time to get trained for the skills needed. Learning and working have become one and the same. New words and concepts have cropped up – crowdsourcing, collaboration, digital skills, personal learning network, social learning, social business. Organizations moved from being a building in a fixed location to a distributed network of employees and geographically dispersed offices. Collaboration and cooperation became vital to the survival of the organization and the individual.

Organizations thus felt the pressure to enable social learning and collaboration in some form. And jumped onto the easiest of the bandwagons – that of new, glossy technology. New platforms, new devices, uber connectivity. However, what most organizations forgot is the culture change required. Organizations fell prey to the vendors of social platforms believing that technology could solve the problem.

However, as organization after organization floundered in their attempt to enable enterprise collaboration and social learning, the phrase social learning took on a slightly desperate note. It was something organizations knew they had to do, but wasn't quite sure how to go about it. The general cry was one of cynicism and despair. One half said, “See the platform is a ghost town; no one writes even one line. I knew all these new-fangled ideas wouldn't work.” The other more believing and forward thinking half said, “Ok, so we have a platform, and no one participates. Where did we go wrong?”

The truth of the matter is that a platform is not the solution. Changing the organization culture is. Easier said than done of course. How does one change years of built in mindset and handed down wisdom? How does one convince managers and VPs to give up the very power they worked so hard to achieve? How does one convince individuals victimized by the Bell Curve, rewarded for being competitive, taught to hoard knowledge to suddenly give up all these for wishy-washy words like trust, values, collaboration and sharing?

IMHO, it is not only a question of organizational strategy but also of organizational philosophy.

Changing from a command and control, hierarchical set up to a networked and open wirearchy is neither easy nor quick. It requires concentrated change management strategy that includes above all, bringing the human back into the organization. It means demonstrating trust, practising open sharing, following transparent processes. It means being unafraid to fail without losing commitment to success. It means redefining success criteria. It means being in alignment with one’s goals and purpose. It means walking the talk – all the time. These statements are of course easier to write down and sound pretty good on paper. However, when one attempts to translate these into practices and manifested behaviours that will make sense in an organizational set-up, suddenly one is confounded by the existing processes and priorities that are most often in direct opposition to the spirit of the statements.

To transition from a hierarchical to a networked and transparent culture requires a conscious untangling of all the unspoken assumptions and biases that inform the present culture and values. Without an explicit understanding of the assumptions across the board, it is not possible to change any one them. While culture is perhaps one of those make or break things, there is really no defined framework or model for culture. It is as elusive as it is org specific. Hence, culture can only be perceived from the standpoint of manifested behaviours and actions taken by the top management and the employees.

For social learning to thrive (i.e., for individuals to share freely, work transparently, learn from each other, critique without malice and so on), the culture must be supportive. What does this mean? Here are a few changes organizations need to make if they truly believe that social collaborative learning is the way to go: 

• Senior management must walk the talk; if they don’t have time to engage on the collaboration platform, the rest of the organization will not have the time either 
• Transparent sharing of information must be the default mode; if employees cannot be trusted with organizational information, then the wrong people have been recruited 
• Collaboration and cooperation must be rewarded; if the measurement system continues to reward competitive behaviour, then that is what will be perpetrated 
• Individuals need to feel empowered; open and honest sharing cannot be driven by fear and a carrot and stick approach. Open and honest sharing comes from employees feeling respected and appreciated. 
• Sharing of knowledge is a discretionary effort; unappreciated employees will hold back on their DE. Genuine appreciation, support and coaching need to define management attitude.

In summary, integrating social learning in the workplace requires:

1. In-depth analysis of existing assumptions and biases
2. Critical assessment of the management model and methods
3. Honest look at what is holding people back from collaborating and sharing
4. Evaluation of the modes of reward and feedback being practised
5. Drawing up a desired future state vision (in collaboration with employees)
6. Defining of a clear change management strategy with special emphasis on management responsibilities
7. Implementation of the strategies with the leadership and top management "leading" the way 
8. Redefining of processes and systems to support the change (adhering to the old rules while expecting new behaviour is not only counter-productive but also damaging)
9. Celebrating small successes; rewarding genuine effort
10. Tracking the impact and sharing it with the organization  

Micro-Learning as a Workplace Learning Strategy

In today's time-crunched, attention-deficit and multitasking world, micro-learning seems to have cropped up as a possible solution to corporate learning and personal development. However, what exactly is micro-learning remains a bit of an elusive concept with different people defining it in different ways. Should it be something that takes less than 5 minutes to consume? Can a 10-minute learning byte be defined as micro-learning? Would a commoncraft-style video be considered micro-learning? Is an infographic summarizing and presenting data and text micro-learning? In my earlier posts, I have written about the possible roles it can play in formal, informal and incidental learning. I have briefly explored the possibilities of transition from courses to micro-learning in the context of workplace learning. Wikipedia has a good definition of the concept:

Micro-learning can also be understood as a process of subsequent, "short" learning activities, i.e. learning through interaction with micro-content objects in small timeframes.

I have tried to define some of the key characterized and put them together in the diagram below. However, these are in no way definitive or the only characteristics but a set of guidelines…

The way the term is being bandied about now would make one think that it is a new phenomenon designed to solve a myriad of workplace learning challenges. The term and the concept has suddenly captured the imagination of workplace learning professionals and course designers as well as clients due to a variety of reasons: 

1. The rise of mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity 
2. The deluge of available information and decreasing attention span 
3. The need for just-in-time and just-enough information to get the job done 
4. The entry of enterprise collaboration platforms in organizations 
5. The distributed and dispersed nature of workers leading to a need for online collaboration 

Most of these phenomena are interconnected and impact one another. It is critical not only understand the drivers behind this sudden surge but also how it can be implemented in workplace learning strategy.

The Drivers

An influx of mobile devices have changed how people interact with content. It is now more likely to be in short bursts or 2~5 minutes, several times a day rather than for long durations once or twice a day as was the case when we were primarily tied to our laptops or desktops. Our work is also becoming location agnostic. We are no longer tied to a desk and a building to get our jobs done. Neither are we always co-located with the teams we work with. This free-flowing nature of work requires rapid exchange of information and sharing of knowledge in byte-sized chunks that are easy to assimilate. 

Working out loud is one of the means to make collaboration and work effective in today’s context. Similarly, technicians in a remote location can quickly record a video of the issues they are facing and post it on their internal collaboration platform for a solution from the experts who may be located half way across the world. This instantaneous kind of information and knowledge exchange, peer support, and sharing of tacit knowledge happen in short bursts. Because these interactions are typically need driven and occur spontaneously, we don’t classify these as micro-learning instances. But IMHO these are very effective micro-learning occurrences that take place in our daily lives – professional and personal – and make it possible for us to function effectively.

A deluge of content coupled with an ever decreasing shelf-life of knowledge is forcing people to access a huge mass of information just to keep on top of things. This telling article from HBR – When Learning at Work Becomes Overwhelming -  talks about the unrealistic levels of learning requirements from workers today. This constant need to add new skills and knowledge is leading to a reluctance to spend too much time on something that may prove to be irrelevant in a couple of months’ time. The focus is on the bare minimum needed to get one’s work done effectively. Is that a good thing or bad is the topic for another post. The reality is that individuals and organizations are looking for options to keep on top of things in the easiest possible manner.

Add to these an ever decreasing attention span, technology disruption, complex and distributed workflows – and one can see why micro-learning seems to be looming up all too frequently. It seems somehow to be irrevocably tied to all the items mentioned above. Organizations, in a bid to make learning accessible and digestible, are trying to include micro-learning as a part of their workplace learning design strategy.

However, by welding micro-learning to technology, we could be missing the core principles. The questions to ask are: How novel is micro-learning? Is it a new phenomenon or a new and catchy phrase gaining popularity in the L&D and business world because of its linkage to mobile learning?

Any learning or insight that can occur in a few minutes or so is a form of micro-learning. By wedding it to technology, we are perhaps giving it a new form but the concept is not new. 

• A mentor giving feedback on a task done can be micro-learning unless it is an extended feedback session. 
• An email with a few lines of instruction is micro-learning. 
• An app with a 2-minute recipe is micro-learning. 
• A comment from a peer on one’s work. 
• Tweet chats, telephone conversations, IMs, coffee time discussions – any and all of these can be micro-learning 

Micro-learning can be formally designed and built into learning programs in various forms or it can occur as informal exchanges of knowledge and information either online or face-to-face. L&D today needs to include micro-learning as a strategy and incorporate formally designed micro-learning into programs as well as facilitate informal interactions that lead to individual learning and organizational problem solving.

Implementing Micro-Learning in the Workplace

Working out loud on the enterprise collaboration platform is not only narration of work but also entails the use of principles of micro-learning (sharing byte-sized processes to help others learn from their experiences). In short, our days are filled with moments of learning – whether by design or by happenstance. I saw the movie Cinderella over the weekend which has this line: Just because it is done doesn’t mean it should be done. The line stuck in my head because of its broad applicability and the profundity underlying the simplicity. To me, this is micro-learning.

L&D and business are trying to define and give a coherent shape to micro-learning because we want to “productize” it. We want to design capsules and bytes of information in various forms like videos, podcasts, text, infographic, etc. “Productization” shouldn’t necessarily imply technology enabled micro-learning bytes. Can managers and mentors be taught to think in terms of micro-learning? Can they give just enough feedback or on the job guidance in one go to adhere to the principles of micro-learning? It is possible to design a weekly feedback session for team members that will not exceed 10 mins. The manager could wear a mentor’s hat and the conversation could revolve around 3~4 key questions with a time limit of 10~15 mins.  

1. What are the two things you learned this week/fortnight? 
2. What obstacles are you facing? 
3. How can I help you?

These kinds of conversations will not only enable the employee to keep on track but also provide them with a tool to reflect upon and extract their learning. This can be hugely enlightening and invigorating. Appraisals and feedback need not be a painful and somewhat useless discussion occurring twice a year far removed from the time of the incidences. Feedback discussions can be a part of an organization’s micro-learning strategy.

This was just an example to show that micro-learning, with some careful consideration and design thinking, can be a critical part of workplace learning in various forms – informal and formal and also social and collaborative. By defining and socializing the principles behind micro-learning, L&D can enable organizations apply these in various contexts by helping business leaders, managers and mentors understand these. It can happen anytime, anywhere, in any form – synchronously, asynchronously, and semi-synchronously. It can occur in self-driven learning, in peer-to-peer learning, in a manager-worker discussion, in a social learning setting, and be incorporated into a formally designed course.

The diagram below captures some forms of micro-learning: