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!

Embedding Indigenous perspectives into learning

I came across this wonderful 8-Ways learning approach to integrate Australian Indigenous perspectives into the classroom and beyond. Although this model of learning is targeted at Indigenous kids, I think it also provides some very powerful principles for delivering learning experiences to the broader community. Both in a school setting and in workplace learning.

Workplace culture, social learning & workforce homogenisation

I often see talented people come into a business, recruited for their transferable skills and potential to contribute to a team. We talk up their existing skills and experience, and reassure the new starter that they bring something very valuable to the job - you're going to be alright in this new job because you largely already have the fabric to succeed!

And then we send them to the front-line, where the prevailing culture and influence of their colleagues, socialise them into assuming homogenised work practices and ways of thinking. The new starter understands that to gain acceptance they need to largely conform to a way that is defined by certain parameters - often it's the only way. Ultimately the new starter becomes part of a stifled approach that struggles to find the solutions and drive the outcomes that the business demands.

The intersection of human resources, management and recruitment typically centres on appointing people who are a 'good fit' for an organisation. This rationale perhaps makes sense where a skill set is perceived to meet the demands of work limited to relatively low complexity process tasks. However this 'good fit' principle shouldn't be about sourcing people with a view to homogenising your workforce.

Increasingly work is now being undertaken in dynamic environments where people need to 'think on their feet' and adapt their skills to novel situations. People need to collaborate in order to synthesise solutions to meet complex business challenges. This requires high level analysis, creativity and innovation. These attributes may be overlooked and under-expressed in an organisation based on 'good fit' principles and a homogenising culture.

'Good fit' for complex work should perhaps be linked to the potential of an individual to bring diversity to a team. Diversity of skills, experience, ways of thinking - a degree of uniqueness and capacity to share something different across the network.

Social learning through the interactions across a diverse workforce has the potential to be a melting pot and fermenter of ideas. This is in contrast to the narrow perspectives you observe in a homogenised workforce.

It is not 'social' when a workplace culture limits or even punishes diversity, punishes difference. 'Social' to me, has its foundation in the connection of 'like-minded' people, in the sense that there is a spirit of sharing, augmenting, refining and applying ideas that are distilled through the coalescing of diverse perspectives.

Organisations promote the importance of shared values. However, shared values does not mean conformity of opinion. Further, diversity and difference does not imply a lack of shared purpose or shared vision.


"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”  


James Surowiecki (2005), The Wisdom of Crowds

Diversity can bring a richness of ideas and a creative climate. A flourishing creative climate potentially drives innovation. Well positioned innovation can provide business with a competitive edge and sustainability. Let's value difference and support diversity as a means of facilitating individual and collective success.

Shifting from push to pull

Recently I've 'discovered' some wonderful contemporary thinking around workplace learning. I suppose you could call this a social learning movement - it's a kind of post-modern interpretation of how we best learn to do our jobs.

The social learning paradigm is driven in no small way by the shortcomings of the traditional L & D model premised on just-in-case, push learning (top-down training). In today's rapidly changing business environment the argument for radically altering our approach to workplace learning is compelling.

The social learning approach is a revelation, in the sense that it provides a cohesive narrative and confirms my observations, thinking and frustrations with the 'default' training model. What a breath of fresh air for someone embedded in an organisation locked into an L & D program from a bygone era! It's enabled me to extricate myself back into some sort of parallel universe of progressive thinkers and possibilities. So I'm currently unlearning - relearning and evolving - crawling my way out of the viscous quagmire of 'training'!

I'm talking to people about the 70/20/10 model, social/informal learning, just-in-time, pull learning, Wikis, workscapes, collaboration, learning networks, social media tools and beyond. Charles Jennings cohesively captures much of this in a beautiful piece of storytelling.

So what might be some of the essential  ingredients to create a climate where learning is blended into the workflow - in the spirit of 'work is learning and learning is the work'?

1. Provide pull learning resources and promote collaboration so people can experience the value of self-directed learning through success on the job
2. Support networked learning through structured and informal opportunities for sharing information and higher level collaboration, including social media tools to facilitate learning networks
3. Recognise that performance is limited if based on individual expertise and enhanced by collective thinking - network knowledge
4. Promote information sharing and collaboration through physical workspace design, social media tools and a culture of conversation
5. Provide a cohesive range of multimedia resources that can be pulled from a user friendly platform to suit individual needs and learning preferences
6. Create a Wiki driven by bottom-up contributors to provide an agile learning and performance tool to meet a changing business landscape
7. Scale back push learning events into engaging bursts of two-way dialogue closely aligned with the context of work
8. Shift to a leadership model that facilitates a degree of autonomy to drive self-directed learning, collaboration and performance

The challenge is to integrate these elements into the fabric of work, in a way that inherently supports and fosters  learning, and enhances performance on the job. Ultimately the organisation needs to recognise that learning sits at the core of everything its people undertake on the job.

No talking in the classroom!

I've recently observed just how much my children share and collaborate as part of their own learning at school. My 11 year old is fortunate enough to find himself in a group of like-minded smart kids. His teacher has a wealth of experience and a talent for creating a learning environment, often centred around group activity, where talking and energetic conversations are the norm. This is in stark contrast to the oppressive classroom etiquette that I endured through the 1970s!

I recently commented to a few friends recently - what can you really 'teach' a bunch of smart kids anyway? Isn't it more about creating this fertile collaborative environment, rich with competing ideas and lively debate, including peer assessment of each other's efforts in a positive spirit.

Yes the teacher does guide the children's learning to a considerable extent. However, once kids have consolidated the fundamental 3R's, surely the teacher's role should look more like a facilitator. This type of learning will increasingly revolve around kids pulling the learning to meet the demands of interesting, relevant challenges. Sharing and collaborating then become a key strategy for kids to solve complex problems, not unlike the work they may undertake in the future.

My 13 year old has taken this collaborative approach to learning a step further by utilising social media. I was surprised to hear about a study group on Facebook. The students are using Facebook out of school to work through problems set as homework. To some extent this learning strategy was borne out of a need to compensate for perceived shortcomings in the classroom. The teacher is unaware of this study group on Facebook and it's interesting to see the power of social learning grow organically across a group of connected people.

This collaborative learning, commonplace across this generation of children, and further enhanced by social media tools, provides a strong platform for the workforce of the future. The value of collaboration and the emerging social tools should also be a model for learning at work. The potential influence of these digital natives on the way people should learn at work now and will in the future, is exciting and thought provoking.

So what is 'collaboration' and how does it fit with 'sharing'? I think that sharing and collaboration form some sort of continuum between a simple exchange of resources and high level interaction that translates into a solution.

Although most of us crave connection with other people, even those of us who are introverts, it's challenging to create an environment at work that leads to a collaborative culture. I believe a major challenge for developing a collaborative workforce is management consent to explore your work with others.

Managers need to embrace a paradigm shift from a position of supervision and control to the role of leader and facilitator. This transition is going to be difficult for managers with a perception that sharing and collaborating, particularly with the enhancements possible with social media tools, is too spontaneous, disordered and chaotic. It's difficult to control and surely all this conversation distracts people from their real work!

On a macro-level it's a shift from 'organisation as a machine' to organisation as an organism where a business is designed around networks of connected people. The wirearchy is replacing the traditional hierarchy by introducing collaboration-based knowledge work that incorporates the Web and social media tools.

Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner in The New Social Learning highlight the dimension that collaboration brings to learning and performance in the workplace :

"Training often gives people solutions to problems already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome before."

Let's not have a 'no talking in the classroom' mentality at work - let's enjoy the richness of sharing at the highest level.