Harold Jarche has a great blog and shares a lot of his thinking on old HR and old learning and what social learning could bring to organizations. Recently he had a post titled 'Work is learning and learning it the work' that got me thinking.
He basically opposed against pulling learning and work out of each other, as it seems to be in many companies. This is shown by the fact that most companies have someone responsible for learning (HR manager or Learning & Development manager) and formal (online) training.
Learning should be the work. Maybe it's even stronger: Learning is the work. Harold challenges us to actively observe how people are learning to do their job right now.
But why is this so hard for companies? I've written about Peter Senge's book before. Hardly any companies I know can truly be called a learning organization. And Senge's book has been out for more than 20 years now...
As Harold proposes, a simple step could be to "provide time and space for reflection and reading". Some companies like Google explicitly give employees time to do something else. But most people are not given time to reflect. They have to take it themselves, because they themselves find it important to learn. What's wrong here?
Maybe the solution is to start at the personal level. Like Harold's focus on PKM (personal knowledge management), we should start with personal learning. We decide to want to learn and therefore need time to reflect and read. If your company doesn't give you that space, maybe you should move on. Is that it? Or are there other ways?
Also refer to this post by John Stepper about why managers do stupid things.
Showing posts with label social learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social learning. Show all posts
Mastering the Social Work Mindset - HR and Enterprise 2.0 #e20s
Anthony kicks off with a sort presentation about HR and Enterprise 2.0. (Last year there was only one participant from the HR department at this Summit. This year there are many more.) HR should be on the wagon because people are the core of organizations. McKinsey recently stressed that the role of HR in E2.0 is essential. Why? Because of the inter-generational cultures (millenials, etc.), new job descriptions (like the community manager), talent management, impact on visibility and mobility (career development, L&D), etc.
It's important to look at and change the tradition HR processes for E2.0 success.
Ellen doesn't like the word training relating to social media and enterprise 2.0. Training is too much a one-way lecture. At Ellen's company they developed a social learning environment. The courses are designed for the people and not the other way around. In the environment they start with suggestions for tasks not a prescriptive tasks. The trainers are facilitators and the participants train each other. The results surprised Ellen. There was huge amount of feedback between participants. It relates to workplace learning, instead of formal learning. Learning is more integrated into work. There was an immediate translation to their work.
Another interesting thing Ellen tells about is how the HR department goes out and listens to the organizational social networks to find out what is working well and how to improve social learning.
Ellen is convinced the Training department has to change their mindset. The Training department will not be needed in the future. It will have in the networks.
The IT Flower Revisited
Recently I read Harold Jarche's post about "Informal Learning is a Business Imperative". I find his work on social learning and personal knowledge management highly interesting. Most of his posts contain lots of food for thought and have interesting diagrams to chew on.
This post did as well. The diagram in this post clearly shows the different types of work and how they relate to different types of learning. This fits perfectly on my two above-mentioned posts about the IT Flower. This diagram is an extra layer focused on types of work and learning. (Or the other way around, whatever you like!) I’m also happy to see that the diagram shows that even in very structured work there are still non-routine tasks. Just like in typical knowledge work, routine stuff like filling in hourly reports has to be done...
I love these connections via the blogosphere. Information learning in practice!
(Diagram is link to actual picture by Harold Jarche.)
Learning Organizations Then and Now
Harold Jarche and Jay Cross (who recently pointed me to these interesting posts about this topic), to name just two experts, have been writing and publishing about this topic. They wonder: How can learning be improved by using social media? How does social media affect and possibly change learning? What is social learning? Related to this, Jarche also writes and talks about personal knowledge management, which also relates to personal learning. Really interesting stuff. I follow their work closely. (I've collected some links here.)
Back to the Fieldbook. Peter Senge’s work was published before the internet went mainstream. And way before we even thought about social media, likes blogs and wiki’s. Reading the Fieldbook in 2011 is fascinating if you keep that in mind. Often I wondered: How would people in the nineties have implemented that idea? Now, with modern tools that’s easy, but then?
The core of the learning organization was that people agreed to increase the collective insight and capacity of the organization. And by learning faster than the competition, a competitive advantage could be achieved.
Interestingly the book is also focused on managers that want to ‘learn to learn’ from the results, reflections and experiments of others. This information which is shared and developed, is not only discussed but used as springboard for new experiments and initiatives.
The Learning Organization consists of 5 learning disciplines (which are never done):
- Personal mastership: using our skills to get the results we want and create an organizational context in which all are encouraged to develop in the direction of the goals of their choice.
- Mental models: think about our internal world view, continuously changing and improving it, influencing our actions and decisions.
- Collective vision: work towards a joint vision of the future and define the principles with which we want to achieve that future.
- Team learning: create a situation in which the collective intelligence of the whole is more than the sum of the individuals.
- Systems thinking: understanding and using the whole to create harmony.
According to the Fieldbook, which is based on cases from practioners, successful learning organizations will be defined by the following:
- Power is distributed
- Self-discipline is encouraged
- Systems thinking will be developed
- Improved discussion skills
- Leaders will be followed voluntarily
- The whole is more important than the sums of its parts
- ‘me’ is intrinsically connected with and part of the whole
- The creational power of language
Of course the focus of the learning organization book is on changing organizations and people. So when they talk about implementing the learning organization they look at changing employee behavior and skills, and organizational structures. Every now and then technology does pop up in the book through. An example from AT&T mentions forums. And email, virtual meeting (then called: electronic meetings), computer networks and databases are mentioned. The databases are mentioned relating to the importance of institutional memory in communities.
The learning organization sees companies as communities (organisms). A very interesting statement is made towards the end of the book:
The lifeblood of the organization as community is dialogue, not only within teams but in the whole organization. If intellectual capital is the most important production factor than the capacity to have deep discussions about important topics is essential for breakthrough thinking and innovation.Isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this also one of the ways social media can be used inside and outside organizations? To facilitate and encourage dialogue. And learning. To be that’s what using social media has brought me. And the nice thing is, you and I can do this if we’re manager or not. The tools to support learning have a lot to do with human skills. But the tools can support that learning processes in huge vibrant networks. By articulating what we learned, what our questions are, who we know, what we’ve found, etc. And we’re not limited to doing this within organization anymore. We can do this between organizations and institutions as well.
To me this is progress. This really helps us implement the learning organization in our daily lives. And in that we in the organizations, communities and institutions we live in and work for. We are creating and using “creation spaces” as mentioned in The Power of Pull (p. 19):
Creation spaces differ in at least two ways from the “learning organization” approaches pioneered a couple of decades ago. First, they emerge as ecosystems across institutions rather than within a single institution, so they reach a much more diverse set of participants. Second, they are not primarily focused on learning – their goal is to drive more rapid performance improvement, and learning occurs as a by-product of these efforts.Bonus quote from the Fieldbook relating to social media/enterprise 2.0 ROI: “Measure in a quantitive way what can be measured quantitively; measure qualitively what can’t be measured.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)