Blogging to reclaim your mojo

I somehow fell into blogging a few months ago in an effort to rekindle my intellectual verve. This was following a sustained period of working within a largely unstimulating environment with little sense of professional growth.

It was quite a step to enter the public space where you're ideas are potentially exposed - taken that someone actually stumbles across your blog, let alone reads it!

I think my initial motivation to blog was more around challenging myself intellectually, to distill my ideas into a narrative, rather than engage with a social network. The process of blogging quickly energised my thinking in a way I hadn't experienced for some time. 

Blogging isn't for everyone, though I think it's a tremendous medium for making sense of the information you're digesting and for narrating your work to others as a stimulus for dialogue and further learning. I've recently embraced Harold Jarche's approach to Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)   and I see blogging as an integral part of this process for me. I'm now trying to share my blog posts and hopefully engage with others on Twitter.

Blogging brings many challenges, including developing your online voice, which should sit more in an engaging conversational style rather than the academic realm where many of us have our roots. Another challenge is making a regular commitment to blogging, which ideally should become a habit. When you're juggling the competing demands of work and family, it's not easy to find the time or headspace to maintain continuity.

I have tried to engage some of my colleagues in my blog to stimulate some sort of intellectual exchange. However, my colleagues don't really get blogging as a point for engaging with each other, in what seems to them - beyond the (mechanistic) context of work.

 

Although I'm still a neophyte, I've found blogging to be transformational and see it as a valuable learning tool for organisational storytelling and informal knowledge management.

I'll leave you with something powerful from blogging advocate, Euan Semple.
Starting the Social Media Journey

Yamming the new starter

A few months ago I was searching for a tool that might shift our business towards a more collaborative culture and to support the informal-formal learning continuum. I then introduced Yammer by stealth and have been watching it spread virally across a considerable sector of our organisation.

Currently the business is recruiting for a 'trainee program' and I'm now exploring the versatility of this enterprise social media platform in the context of onboarding. My vision for an extended onboarding program includes:

• Building relationships across the new starter group, L&D & HR prior to commencement
• Introducing the training program & transition-to-job process during pre-commencement period
• Augmenting the formal training program, including reflective discussion
• Exploring collaborative activities, particularly with transition-to-job
• Establishing & supporting a broad learning network on-the-job
• Supporting learning in the workflow, to sustain a ‘work is learning – learning is work’ culture

When I revisited Yammer to drill down into functionality, it confirmed my thinking around versatility on a single platform. When I began listing the features of Yammer it became apparent that they’re too numerous to discuss comprehensively in this space. However, I’ll concisely outline a few features of Yammer that meet my requirements.

1. Provides an internally secure social media tool

2. Simplicity of use compatible with Facebook

3. Enables special interest groups such as a new starter / on boarding

4. External groups can be formed which would enable relationship building prior to start date

5. Provides for Posting Polls & Praising individuals which may be useful in formal learning & beyond

6. Easy to add links & share documents

7. Useful toolbar gadgets such as ’Yam it’ for sharing internet content

8. iPhone & Android mobile apps available for on-the-go learning

9. Search engine for locating threads of interest or subject matter experts from profile tags

10. Search for expertise across organisation to support collaboration, pull learning & learning networks

11. Pages function to provide a group document space for collaborative work in formal learning

12. Provides a sense of connection for new starters seeking to become accepted into a community

13. Freeware provides more than adequate functionality

For these reasons I see Yammer as my preferred enterprise social media platform.

Yammer seems to have now gathered a critical mass, including some of the key players in the business and has even reached the CEO this week! As serendipity has it, I’ve now fallen into an ‘unofficial’ working party, which has seen a flurry of activity over the last week. The challenge is now to get senior management endorsement for broad implementation and preferably to see them on the site as users.

I’m quietly optimistic that I may be reporting back in the coming months about the implementation and application of Yammer across the workplace learning continuum.

Personal Knowledge Management

Harold Jarche highlights the potential acceleration of learning with emerging social media tools. Network learning provides an unprecedented platform for personal knowledge management (PKM) through a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

Certainly for knowledge workers (and really we're all knowledge workers to some extent regardless of occupation), the skills of PKM are a critical success factor. We hear every day about the knowledge economy and the demise of organisations that fail to adapt to a rapidly changing business climate.

For instance, this week in Australia we saw the substantial downsizing of Fairfax Media and perhaps the beginning of the end for print media. Many commentators are reporting that Fairfax has responded too late to the digital era.

There can be ramifications for both organisations who neglect knowledge management, framed within the contemporary digital landscape, and for individuals within those organisations who don't adapt their skills to bring high value work practices.

Organisations should be facilitating a culture of PKM and promoting its value to its people as a significant strategy for capacity building, continuous improvement, innovation, renewal, reconstruction and engagement.

PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation.

So what does PKM mean for the individual focused on professional growth and adaptability within today's dynamic business environment?

Seek / Sense /Share is magnified by Web 2.0

Seek out information, make sense of it & share your thinking to test it & provide context

Narrating your work helps you synthesise your thinking into a context that enables application

Finding & growing your online voice extends your reach & enhances your PKM

Narration is the essential ingredient for engaging & sharing, as a pathway to higher order learning

Connection with people across a network is the fabric that facilitates PKM

Networks should go beyond colleagues to also include looser external connections

Diversity has a multiplying effect on the value of networks & increases serendipitous opportunities

PKM is a lifelong journey – a lifestyle!