CHAPTER 3

Transition and Engage

UP YOU CLIMB. Fixing the telephone line for a customer who has been without service for hours. He’s called customer service twice. You’ve done this a hundred times, but this time the weather is worse than usual. A tree is precariously close to the pole. Something just doesn’t feel right. It’s not as though there’s someone else who could get to this remote site whom you could ask how to proceed.

You walk back to your truck, get out your handheld device, point it toward the pole, and narrate the situation you’re facing. Three minutes later you upload the digital footage to your company’s in-house learning and collaboration system, and you ask for eyes. You’re feeling a little better already, knowing you’re not alone. If two minds are better than one, why not thousands?

Within 10 minutes, colleagues from across the country have commented. One points out a wiring issue you hadn’t noticed. Another suggests a new technique she’d used that you hadn’t heard about. The third reminds you of a similar sticky situation you’d been in and how your instincts helped you through.

Imaginative story or on-the-job learning? If you work for TELUS, the Vancouver, Canada–headquartered telecommunications company, this is more than science fiction.

Dan Pontefract, author of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization and TELUS’s chief envisioner, was hired to modernize their training function into a media-rich, collaborative, and customer-focused change engine. Rather than develop an expensive proprietary system, he worked with internal stakeholders to source multiple technologies that created a highly usable system—TELUS Habitat Social.

At its core, Habitat Social is a means for the 45,000 people employed by TELUS around the world to tell stories of experiences that are instructive, as well as to quickly seek assistance from their peers. These are the people responsible for 13 million landline, wireless, satellite, and digital connections across Canada.

Frontline technicians need fast information, accessible from their trucks while on-site with customers, to learn quickly as they change routers, set up home phone systems, and perform custom installations they may never have done before.

By equipping the technicians with a media mindset and a culture of collaboration, everyone shares responsibility for educating one another and giving each person an opportunity to seek focused help. The workforce becomes the organization’s lifeline to what’s happening in the field right now. The same can be said for call-center support agents or team members in the sales organization.

Alongside easily digestible bits of text, photos, and video created in the field capturing setting and context are documents, recorded broadcasts, and simulations. People throughout the organization can make and review comments, rate content “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” and offer recommendations to other team members regardless of the department they work in.

Updates in quick-access form can be searched by topic, category, or keyword. There is a formal taxonomy and an informal folksonomy (a term coined by information architect Thomas Vander Wal, combining the terms folk and taxonomy to convey an organic, ad hoc, and friendly way to tag, categorize, and locate content based on the terms people use in ordinary speech).¹ For example, a video of a TELUS OPTIK TV installation could be tagged as relating to the TV business, installations, media content, or wiring.

Content powered communities need social learning, good UX, search, semantic analysis and well planned analytics.
—Megan Bowe

This defies any preconceived idea of who is a producer and who is a consumer of learning at TELUS. The organization’s goal is to build workforce competence and acumen, enabling everyone to make good judgments and quick decisions to better serve customers. All content is readily available in an easily contributed and consumed format, used by people in multiple countries 24 hours a day.

After 14 years of leading large organizational change and learning programs, Pontefract knew that the first things to prompt cultural shift are the stories people tell one another. It’s why media sharing was always so central to his plans. But people won’t share if the culture doesn’t support it.

He knew the culture transformation would require more than adding an interface and tools. The organization needed to change its own practices, too. For example, they decided to implement the TELUS Leadership Philosophy (TLP)—an open and collaborative leadership model for all 45,000 team members at the company. The TLP runs parallel to their learning strategy, where leadership and learning are thought to be equal parts formal, informal, and social.

When the TLP launched in 2010, alongside Habitat Social, behaviors and tools were bridged, and the culture began to become more open and collaborative. Employee engagement rose from 53 percent to 85 percent, and customer complaints against TELUS decreased by 26 percent, representing only 5.8 percent of overall industry complaints, despite TELUS’s owning 28 percent of the wireless market share in Canada.

Since assisting the creation of TELUS Habitat Social, Pontefract has been tasked with the mandate to help change the culture of the other TELUS organizations. In his new role, he takes this social concept further, into the hearts and minds of people not just where they aim to learn—but as they aim to work on issues that matter most. As he often says, “We’re not here to see through each other; we’re here to see each other through.”²

Set Your Sights High

Once you have a sense of how to introduce social learning into the daily practices in your organization, it’s time to dig in and widen your horizons.

Set your sights not on just getting to the next phase, rather on focusing your attention on working toward the right sorts of objectives, ensuring you’re meeting the goals you set out to achieve, and creating less work (and higher value) for yourself and your colleagues as quickly as possible.

“We’re not here to see through each other; we’re here to see each other through.”

—Dan Pontefract

This chapter introduces how organizations across the globe have grown their social learning approaches and used them to transform their workplaces in ways that feel natural and deeply human.

“We have moved past the early adoption phase of holding hands and sharing files” says Ed Brill, author of Opting In: Lessons in Social Business From a Fortune 500 Product Manager. “Today, we need to create an environment that focuses on company results and personal joy.”³ 

Once people get out of the habit of going it alone, and in the habit of sharing and building on what we know individually and collectively, we can create connected teams, working and learning together across the miles.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
—Helen Keller

Strategy 1. Invite People Onto the Dance Floor

“We’ve created a wonderful environment for people to work together, and this new guy took a document that a group of us had been working on, and started sharing it with other groups as if it were his own.” This was the dilemma of a real-world leader-in-transformation we spoke with, aiming to bring her organization into the social world. She was exasperated both by his behavior and that of others who were excited that a high-visibility colleague had come on board. She wanted to explain to her team, people who had little experience working collaboratively, why his behavior wasn’t cool, while also not dampening their enthusiasm for the project or calling the offender names.

“I wish I had a way to explain this in terms everyone can relate to,” she said. “I’ve seen things like this happen for years, and they’re just not right.” They are, however, the sorts of real experiences along the path to organizations working in new ways, which requires new skills to handle. Kevin Prentiss, a speaker and executive advisor on engagement and supporting technology, likens patterns of change to your first high school dance. Inevitably, there are people hanging around the walls of the gym who haven’t any idea what to do with themselves. Those wallflowers may not be on the furthest edges to examine the paint; it’s more likely they don’t have the skills or personality to jump into the fray.

Dance floors have patterns that represent our basic humanity. We all have experience with them. Looking at the introduction of social approaches as the precursor to organizational change can seem too complicated for some and too scary for others.

If we think about the challenge as a school dance, we immediately have a shared framework to make sense of what is happening so we can begin to take action. The dance floor seems simple enough so everyone can discuss it or, even better, act on their own. 

If there were someone at the center of the floor dancing wildly, thrashing his arms around, making people around him fear they could be whacked in the face, how would people handle that? How do your long-since school-dance sensibilities tell you to respond? This isn’t about the dance for people with more energy than finesse. It’s very likely they don’t have the skills or personality to appreciate the dance any more than the wallflowers.

Between those hesitant to participate and those dominating the spotlight because they don’t yet know how to engage in healthy ways, are people moving towards the dance floor and those truly benefiting from dancing with one another.

As you move your organization further along the social path, it’s important to “be able to observe the development of an engagement pattern, the curve of participation,” says Prentiss. It’s up to each of us to differentiate the various stages people are in and help them work in the interest of others and the organization. To increase engagement, create an environment where those along the wall aren’t being pushed towards the center of the floor, rather to the edge of it, where they can talk with other people, perhaps about how awkward they feel.

Likewise, the people already at the edge of the floor might be seeking a dance partner who can coax them further in. From there, people will naturally gain comfort and confidence, without feeling overwhelmed, literally, by those in the center.

Prentiss adds, “Be the spatula. Scoop the edges, gently stirring those who have similar levels of engagement with each other by making introductions and finding commonalities.” 

Imagine the dance circle that instantly forms when someone is genuinely a good dancer and does something extra special. Everything works out as long as the skilled dancer relinquishes the center prior to the watchers in the circle feeling intimidated beyond recovery. Someone else could even jump in. Circles of attention are like bubbles that form, and only become bad if they get stuck.

The people working in the organization’s best interest are those people who are engaged and who aggregate towards the center, move close together, and radiate inviting energy.

Engagement is not the announcement your company’s throwing a dance or an indication you’ve hired the right sorts of individual personalities. Engagement is a measure of shared energy in each moment, engendering a feeling of comfort and belonging that leads to people wanting to do the right thing. 

It doesn’t matter what we cover; it matters what you discover.
—Noam Chomsky

When people get in that conductive dance floor place, it is their peers’ activity that triggers them to see possibilities in themselves. People are influenced by those they consider their peers, people like them, people who are always making their way through the dance.

“Small dance circles make up the whole. Relationships trump music. Some people are conductive and some are resistant by personality. Resistant personalities tend to drink more in, in an effort to become conductive,” says Prentiss. “The best dances are those where a chain reaction leads to a self-amplifying positive loop of participation. The best dances are where everyone loses their self-consciousness, dances a bit, and has a good time even though they are typically stiff and hate that kind of thing.”

What can you do to invite people onto the dance floor, encouraging them, by example, into being the spatula?

• Reach out to members of your community at random, getting a sense of how comfortable they are working this way, and if they would benefit from knowing others who are a little closer to enjoying the dance.

• Pay special attention to people who post once and then retreat to the walls, encouraging further conversation by comment on what they’ve written, directing them to someone else asking questions or providing insights on similar things.

• Get to know the people sweating up a storm, finding ways for them to talk with one another, creating more air space on the floor … and where they can feel the attention they’re craving. With some care and attention, those in the middle might just learn to build rapport with (instead of intimidating) those around them.

• Work to create an environment where people across the space—perhaps because they are of a different nationality, ethnicity, age, or simply have a unique personal style—begin to identify how they (and the community) can benefit from working in new ways, with no expectation they’ll be radically changing who they are in the process.

• Most importantly, realize this isn’t for any one person to do alone … or that whatever your role, your job is to manage all aspects of the dance. It’s a far better practice to work on creating the environment where people can coach and coax one another to engage.

This is a personalized approach that can easily be scaled when many people are working together toward creating a safe and welcoming environment.

Welcome Everyone

With social tools, each person has an opportunity to provide her distinctive perspective on a broad range of topics. Everyone in an organization, regardless of role, title, or focus, can contribute insights to the conversation. The more people that come together, the more information is shared, the more ideas are generated, and the better-informed people’s decisions can be.

All of this discussing and collaborating together leads to an invaluable online, searchable resource for everyone who participates. John Walton, Symmetrix engineer and EMC fellow emeritus, says, “I cannot think of a time during my 20 years at EMC when I felt more informed, involved, and confident in myself and the business before EMC|ONE.” Kevin Prentiss adds that the changes in our workforce, and the expectation of people to have highly customized environments, means that authentic engagement can no longer hide behind words like, “It’s too hard to personalize this for everyone.” If anything, it’s so easy we look incompetent when we don’t. For example, if a small startup can use inexpensive (or even free) mailing list software to address their newsletters with your first name, it’s no longer OK to welcome people with “Dear employee.”

It’s never all or nothing. It’s everything always.
—Megan Murray

Wayne Hodgins, a global futurist now sailing around the world after spending decades focused on technology, standards, and knowledge creation, coined the term snowflake effect to describe the exponentially growing trend toward extreme mass customization for every person, every day.⁴

Be Sure to Ask

At a large financial services firm, the team rolling out the collaborative system repeatedly told the consultants working with them that many of the influencers in the organization were never going to get on board. Knowing that would prove problematic very early on, the consultants fanned out through the headquarters campus to personally visit a few of the “doorstops.”

After explaining in general terms what was coming, and asking what the team could do to gain support, one consultant received quite a surprise. A manager, who had been said to be opposed to any program like this, became very flustered, then put his head in his hands.

When asked if everything was OK, he pulled his hands from his face with tears in his eyes. “I’ve worked here for over 30 years,” he said. “And you’re the first person who has ever asked.” Together they talked through a few ideas the manager had on how to engage with people in his organization and how asking for people’s thoughts—and then truly making changes based on them—could fundamentally alter how he felt about the company, making it one he would be interested in working in for years to come.

Another perceived holdout also provided an unexpected response. One of the company’s most well-respected researchers opened a drawer at the bottom of her desk. In it, she’d been keeping reports and papers throughout her career, “waiting,” she said, “for an opportunity to share this with people who have probably thought I couldn’t help them in their jobs.” The notion of a company-wide network where anyone could connect and share with anyone else, she said, “takes my job in directions I only dreamed might someday happen.”

We have the capabilities and need to invite everyone in the dance.

Strategy 2. Obsess About Getting Back Your Time

At a meeting of a team of leaders at Standard & Poor’s, a woman asked this question with a look of exasperation on her face: “When do you expect us to have time to learn from all this social content? We’re all so busy. Even if the system had all the answers I needed, I’d never know how to find it or how to put it into use—let alone find the time to even think about looking.”

With 34 gigabytes of data—1,005,000 words, 147 newspapers-worth of information—available to each of us every day, it’s hard to imagine any more of anything, content or collaboration, could move us in the right direction.⁵ With such powerful advances in technology thanks to Moore’s Law, we have become overburdened with information while seemingly having difficulty sorting through what might actually help us perform. Declining capabilities reduce organizational value.

Social systems done well should give us our time back. They should replace the outmoded, the time consuming, and the inefficient.

Sheila Babnis, global head of strategic innovation and product development at the biotech firm Roche Pharmaceuticals, says at the beginning of her journey she thought that if she adopted social approaches to work, it would be easier to share information. “Then I realized I could either go to meetings where I’d talk with four people, or I could gather people together online, talking with 4,000 people. We could get input, make decisions, and iterate in real time, all with a similar intimate and connected feel. That’s so much more valuable than just sharing,” she says. “Now I know there’s a whole world I can connect to and want to be part of, solving problems with other people who care about health care. I don’t have to do it anymore by myself and with my tiny group.”

Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know.
—Lincoln Steffens

For her, this was a huge “aha,” after growing up thinking she should solve problems herself. Eventually, though, she says, “I learned those behaviors were no longer useful and I no longer had to work that way. I can use my time far more valuably.” She cut down meeting times by 50 percent and found that accelerated her work by at least 50 percent by spending time having more meaningful conversations that led to co-creation.

Shifting how they worked, Babnis says, “we also created a much stronger bond amongst our team.” Having never been co-located, there are people in San Francisco and Basil, Switzerland, leaving only three hours of overlapping workday time.

In a company with more than 80,000 people, and a division of about 5,500, across five sites, and another 55 affiliates in additional countries, it’s hard to even know who to go to. Using this network approach made a large company feel small.

Working with her team and with other parts of her organization was just the beginning, though, for Babnis. Facilitating meetings online, talking with people across various social channels, and creating new processes out loud, with others in the organization, led her to realize this might be an approach to extending the circle of those who affect her work.

“… I realized I could either go to meetings where I’d talk with four people, or I could gather people together online [and] talk with 4,000 people.”

—Sheila Babnis

With her team, Babnis began looking at how the company could work with patients, clinicians, innovators in very different fields, academics, and even the regulators, “anytime anyplace anywhere. We can broaden our work from being internally focused to looking at ourselves through the eyes of people externally as a global business,” she said.

When the company’s chief medical officer talked publicly about how critical innovation has become and how connected networks should be at the center of how everyone in the organization works, Babnis knew a critical threshold had been crossed. “Pharmaceutical companies have been working in the same way for the last 25 years, and a large percentage of employees in any of the companies out there could say they’ve never had firsthand interaction with patients. Design thinking and human-centered design are critical to gaining empathy and co-creating solutions.”

Just as the shift in her thinking transitioned from sharing information outward, this work shifted everyone in her organization’s perspective, away from just listening and hearing from others.

They began with interviews of 75 people, each who had a stake in what the company offered, aiming to understand what could be changed in this modern, connected world. What came out of those conversations was an empathic understanding that they had an opportunity to build and expand relationships far beyond the subset of people they had been talking with in the past.

Then, rather than gather all the information they had before taking action, they could begin implementing what they heard as they heard it. They didn’t have to wait or wait to be invited. They could initiate conversations and also join those dialogues already going on around what people were doing, finding concrete approaches to solving problems weighing on people’s minds.

Let the network do the work.
—Dion Hinchcliffe

In a connected network, through trusted relationships, they could all focus on engaging the right people at the right time, to create new value and bottom-line impact. This changes how quickly they can uncover solutions for patients. Rather than look at themselves as a drug company, they could become a solutions company.⁶

Harness Discretionary Time

Engagement is often considered a measure of the emotional commitment employees have to the organizations and its goals. When employees care, they tend to use more of their discretionary effort towards helping their organization and those they work with.

“This means the engaged computer programmer works overtime when needed, without being asked. This means the engaged retail clerk picks up the trash on the store floor, even if the boss isn’t watching. This means the TSA agent will pull a big suspicious bag to be searched, even if it’s the last bag on their shift,” says Kevin Kruse, co-author of We: How to Increase Performance and Profits through Full Engagement and author of Employee Engagement 2.0: How to Motivate Your Team for High Performance.⁷

This focuses leaders on asking themselves how willing their employees are to contribute time not blocked off for specific activities. Social approaches provide a means to capture effort—in effect increasing the organization’s labor capacity.

Business coach Ben Brooks encourages leaders to look at discretionary time in a similar way to a carbon sink. In the same ways these reservoirs actively capture and store carbon-containing chemical compounds, “A capacity sink,” says Brooks, “is the capturing and pointing to untapped effort in your organization. Ask yourself if you’re creating an engaged environment where people spend their discretionary effort cleaning their desks, horsing around in the break room, or prepping for their daughter’s bake sale—or are they utilizing that extra capacity to help to drive your organization forward.” The choice is yours.

Filter and Focus

Time-wasting systems are devoid of context. Content, often more than you could ever wade through, was practically thrown at us, completely unrelated to our daily flow of work. These repositories were separate from where we spent our time, from the searches for clues to what we needed and what was important to us.

One challenge social technology can solve is the idea of filtering. For example, how does an organization use social technology tools to find its own expertise?

Online communities and blogs can help identify subject matter experts or workers who may have information pertinent to a particular decision. But determining what is relevant is still the responsibility of each of us individually. Although the environment can create automatic data collections, the human touch provides necessary context.

Online communities can bridge the gap between the climate you have at work today and the one you want to foster—one in which people want to learn from each other because they trust one another. They want to hear from people like them, facing the same decisions, the same challenges, and the same options. As Babe Ruth once said, “You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” The way the team plays collectively determines its success.

Make the value gained by participating its own reward.
—Jeannette Campos

Rather than use social systems to duplicate programs and processes that are working, look at your organization’s weaknesses. New modern approaches are most useful when they address failures or inadequacies in the old ways work was done.

As a society we moved through the divergent phase of networked technology in the 1980s, when people learned to share information within work groups and across organizations because they could. Within the silos, there was a limited amount of context. Between silos, there was less.

Then, in the early 2000s, organizations began working in a convergent way, attempting to present and share information with intention—by design. Content increased, but the information was still not as relevant and accessible as it could be.

Now we are in the middle of a new phase—where relationships between people, and between topic areas and people, are becoming more explicit. There are online groups to meet with in online communities. There are blogs to follow and comment on around topics people care about at work. Social gathering spaces become the means for finding what’s relevant.

Getting a sense of the people who are contributing provides the additional context. “Oh, if Natasha is paying attention to this topic,” you may think to yourself, “and I know she’s just begun working on that new project, then it would be good for me to track and learn about this, too.” With this additional context, people can confront and reduce information overload, now having a way to sift through—based on social relationships—what’s more important than something else.

Be Compelling

In an age of too much digital noise and not enough value, getting and holding attention is pivotal if you want people to learn. If you can’t get people’s interest, what’s the point in even trying to connect with them? Old-school ways of communicating with employees and customers are often ignored altogether in the engaging and entertaining social media world.

Although some argue that social media keeps people from paying attention, research shows that it can be a big part of the solution.

A survey of more than 60 executives by Thomas Davenport and John Beck looked at what got their attention over a one-week period.⁸ Overall, in rank order, the factors most highly associated with getting attention were:

• The message is personalized.

• It evoked an emotional response.

• It came from a trustworthy source or respected sender.

• It was concise.

Social sharing excels at all of these factors. Messages that both evoked emotion and were personalized were more than twice as likely to generate a response.

The best ideas for improving your organization often come from employees, partners, and customers because they have a vested interest in your success and know your organization best. Harnessing their collective wisdom through social means can be both compelling and attention getting.

Social sharing encourages and enables a community where people can see and learn from one another and get contributions from everyone and anyone. Video messages that allow for comments help bridge the gap between leaders and the larger ecosystem. People can provide feedback, ask questions, and send their own videos through the platform’s commenting, tagging, and sharing features.

For example, an employee who is planning to retire could create videos and content about her areas of expertise. A senior executive could create mentoring videos, giving advice to newcomers. A technical employee could create a step-by-step video to explain a procedure. The training department could ask employees to create videos to incorporate into a learning program.

Stories are like a catalyst for processing meaning.
—Clark Quinn

Videos are especially good at presenting things sequentially (this happened, then that) and showing causality (this happened because of that), so they’re a powerful way to show people what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes and effects of those events). In a world of hyperlinking and twitter bits, seeing the whole picture, even a small slice, offers “what” and “why,” which are critical but often hard to discern.

Turn executives’ messages into short video or audio streams. Post them on the intranet, web portal, or online community; pipe them to screens in the entryway; and offer the videos to customers who want to hear the CEO’s perspective.

When seeing isn’t as important, or for sharing information that can be listened to without having to take your eyes off of other things you’re working on, audio podcasts can be used to share valuable historical and explanatory information and knowledge. They can be recorded by individuals as mentoring moments or by two or more people in either interview or panel discussion formats.

Because shared spaces need people to start conversations, consider starting with topics that you care deeply about, things you want others’ perspectives on and that would help in your work. These are the topics you will be the most motivated to invest time in.

Ask hard questions. Asking a dull question takes as much time as asking a meaningful one, so ask those that get at information you and your organization need. “So, how far along are you with this idea?” Or, “Has anyone else succeeded in doing this?” Those who make the most effective members of a collaborative team are those who get to the heart of issues and facilitate effectively and honestly.

Strategy 3. Foster a Sense of Community

Social networks might get more media buzz, but online communities provide something extra special. Community, the place where we live, work, and do things with other people, is a concept most of us learned and put into use when we were very young. Coming from two Latin words meaning “with gifts,” the term community suggests a general sense of reciprocity, altruism, and benefit that comes from doing something together.

The old town of Mombasa, Kenya; the Green Bay Packers fans who watch games wearing cheese-wedge hats; or fire spinners worldwide all comprise examples of communities. Each type has its own shared language, rituals, customs, and collective memory. In most cases, sharing is the norm and people choose what information they share.

When people speak of community today, they are usually calling up the hope of reviving closer bonds among people that seemed to occur in ages past. Don Cohen and Larry Prusak, authors of In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, point out that when we talk about community in business, we nod to the reality that companies and the individuals who run them don’t exist in a social vacuum devoid of ties, histories, loyalties, and values that might influence their actions. There is also a similarity between the way people have learned in communities throughout time and how people in organizations learn.⁹

If you are interested in creating a rich and vibrant connected network of people across your organization, you’re looking to encourage more than a group of people to use social tools. You’re aiming to create a community—one that meets and engages online.

Research from the Network Roundtable, led by Rob Cross at the University of Virginia, showed that people use communities to find others who provide resources, career development, personal support, and context. The depth and breadth of these relationships, whether they are serendipitous or planned, predicts performance, innovation, employee commitment, and job satisfaction.

Community is not a website. Don’t build it like one.
—Trisha Liu

You’re spurring on a community of practice (CoP), a name coined by Étienne Wenger and Jean Lave in the pre-Facebook era to describe a form of social network whose participants “share a passion for something that they know how to do, and who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better.”¹⁰

One study of a community of practice within a critical business unit at Halliburton showed that within one year they were able to lower customer dissatisfaction by 24 percent, reduce cost of poor quality by 66 percent, increase new product revenue by 22 percent, and improve operational productivity by more than 10 percent.¹¹

Vedrana “V” Madiah, vice president of enterprise communication and colleague engagement at Marsh, Inc., points out, “Community helps bring colleagues together to discuss, collaborate, and share common interests.”

Jamie Pappas, director of global brand communications and social media at Akamai Technologies, says, “One of the key strategic benefits of community is connecting people who might have never crossed paths, let alone learned valuable lessons from each other. Breaking down information silos and enabling your employees, customers, partners, and advocates to exchange information that makes their lives easier and enables them to enjoy more of the things they are passionate about provides huge benefits to the business when it comes to employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention; not to mention customer and partner engagement and retention benefits.”

Rachel Happe, principal at The Community Roundtable, a professional services organization for community managers and social business practitioners, reinforces this point, “Communities are fundamentally about relationships and learning from peers, so online communities must be created around individuals. The more they participate and share, the more value they get because that sharing creates serendipity, bringing people and knowledge to them that they didn’t even know they didn’t know. In turn that serendipity saves them time, makes them smarter, and surfaces opportunities for them.”¹³

Because online communities are not constrained by the need for anyone’s physical presence, we have greater flexibility with our ability to join, learn, and congregate with people who have similar interests no matter their location.

Being part of a community—whether online or offline—offers the benefits of belonging, commitment, mutuality, and trust. These are environments where people are free to learn.

“Just be sure not to re-create the silos you already have in your community,” warns Trisha Liu. “This is an easy trap to fall into. The existing structure is familiar. But didn’t you undertake this project because you want something better?”

Questions to consider:

• Have you made it clear that anyone can create or join a community, and have you opened the process up to everyone? If not, do you have a really, really, really good reason?

• Are you participating in the “gardening” of your organization’s communities by at least occasionally participating and commenting?

• Has your organization created a policy that can be used not as a hammer, but rather as a flashlight, providing guidance and encouragement, as well as the opportunity for everyone to participate in expanding, explaining, and improving?

Community Members Look Out for One Another

More effective than rigid policies, a group can help keep its members on track by reinforcing good practices, building and communicating guidelines, removing inappropriate material, and having continual dialogue about the right balance.

On rare occasions, organizations need to take action, but those are few and far between and usually, in the end, reflect more positively than negatively because they demonstrate the power of peers managing one another.

One example of this is on the social collaboration platform at Home Depot. After the system had been in use for a while, managers found that groups became self-policing. According to one member, “Inappropriate behavior just isn’t tolerated, so you really don’t have to worry.”

“One of the key strategic benefits of community is connecting people who might have never crossed paths, let alone learned valuable lessons from each other.”

—Jamie Pappas

That’s not to say people don’t gripe a little bit, which helps the community’s space feel real. It also enables managers to address employee concerns before they take a larger toll on the workforce. For instance, Home Depot originally prohibited employees from wearing shorts after Labor Day. While this was reasonable in cooler areas, employees in warmer climates were displeased, and took to the collaboration space to sound off. As a result of the comments, management changed the policy.

Community Online Connects People Across Great Divides

We’ve been working side by side with people since sandbox days, but there were limits to how much and how far we could share. Email, instant messaging, and text began a movement beyond the walls that separated us. Now we share what we’re doing, ask questions, post details, and mingle our ideas online.

Yet this still leaves out tacit knowledge—things that are hard to communicate by writing and speaking, but can be learned by watching others and actually doing them.

People crave the opportunity to learn from one another, side-by-side, gaining hard facts and wisdom in context. What else could account for the use of classroom learning decades after people realized its inherent limits? We value opportunities to see we are not alone; there are people we can lean on, learn from, interact with, and rely on to help us.

In a landmark study, Richard J. Light of the Harvard Graduate School of Education discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. People who studied in groups, even once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.¹⁴ These students, in their own way, created small communities.

Demographics research at Deloitte uncovered something similar: People who could look to other people online for support felt more connected than their nonconnected counterparts, stayed with their employer longer, and produced stronger results.¹⁵ The creators of Deloitte’s online community, D Street, recognized the benefits of nurturing a culture of reciprocal learning and continue to make sure that’s central to what they do.

Exponential growth comes from the phenomenon of “compound learning curves.”
—Chris Anderson

Community Builds Your Internal Brand

David J. Birnbaum, who supports 101,000 independent sales agents at CENTURY 21 Real Estate in 78 countries, understands that his organization’s social portal is key to building the company’s brand value proposition. As vice president of learning, Birnbaum points out, “our sales professionals are very independent and they could go to a different brand in a second, if we didn’t provide a great platform for them. While the training and information they can get in the portal brings them back again and again, it’s not nearly as important to them as feeling like they are part of a community that supports their development, and ultimately helps improve their business.”

While in the past, a training class brought dispersed co-workers together for a short period of time, and at the end they had a certification with a company logo to hang on a wall, social learning approaches provide an ongoing relationship. Birnbaum adds, “Our agents used to leverage training one to three times a year. Now they log into the portal one to three times a month to learn and much more. After a class, they stay in touch virtually, they continue to follow the instructor, they create groups in the portal, and even set up alumni groups on Facebook. Their learning never ends because they belong to a community, a community of learning and sharing. That community ultimately strengthens our real-estate brand even more as they talk with new agents about the benefits of the portal, and their franchise owners are reminded the brand has ongoing value.”

“The more they participate and share, the more value they get because that sharing creates serendipity, bringing people and knowledge to them that they didn’t even know they didn’t know.”

—Rachel Happe

Salima Nathoo, talent development leader and founder of RocktheGlow, says, “When used inside an organization, social media offers all parts of HR an opportunity to raise their game in influencing people, process, and profits of an organization—beyond policy. It is the face of the company’s internal brand as the organization recruits, hires, and on-boards the next generation of leaders. Not convinced? Ask yourself what the cost is of being unknown, disliked and worst, ignored in the industry and job market?”

Nathoo adds, “Let your employees know the influential role each of them plays in writing the brand story and contributing to collective success. Make it easy for existing and new employees to learn, understand, and communicate the core elements of your brand promise and value proposition. Existing internal social collaboration and communication tools are a great way to accomplish this, crowd-source ideas, and run a pilot. Make it fun with some gamification. Finally, recognize those who do it well.”

Questions to consider:

• Does your system provide “gathering places” where people can participate ad hoc, or spur of the moment, in group activities that will serve to build trust, camaraderie, and morale?

• Do you take pains to advertise and promote, through other, nonsocial media, the opportunities that exist for group activities and collaboration?

• Do you make it clear by what you participate in and support that cooperation and collaboration, not individual competitiveness, are the goals?

Strategy 4. Identify Value Markers

The power of collaborative work is a trusted and repeatable activity, where people can bring their ideas together, vet them with their peers, and publish them in a way that can be revised and revisited, representing multiple viewpoints.

For codifying the multifaceted nature of information, Don Burke and Sean Dennehy, social evangelists in the U.S. intelligence community, have identified three qualities that stand out as markers of success: vibrancy, socialness, and relevance.

Vibrancy

Working socially online should be measured by vibrancy and the ability to energize the people who work in a social way. Social spaces showcase people’s needs, interests, passions, and emotions—so they need to mirror the vibrancy humankind can provide.

Vibrancy characterizes the inviting, energizing place where people want to be. The space is jumping, alive with energy. People come back because they find value.

Envision a party. When you walk in, it takes only a few seconds to judge if you want to be there and if it has taken off. People are exceptionally good at assessing this. It’s primordial. We have millions of years of evolution in our DNA telling us to be wary of a dead place where we stand out, where we wonder, “Is it precarious for me to be here?”

When a collaborative space is hopping with activity, form follows content, not the other way around. Planning revolves around how to get more “eyes on content” to improve accuracy, add perspective and subtleties, and show it has captured what’s new.

This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, though. Someone has to create the vibrancy, open the space, and welcome the guests. Someone has to get the ball rolling. OPENPediatrics and TELUS Habitat Social became successful because initially a core group of people was willing to contribute before there was any reason to do so, before the other participants arrived.

Sometimes the party host or hostess is an organizational leader. Just as often it’s the people working on the front line who have been waiting for their opportunity to invite others into a vibrant conversation that matters, creating ambient awareness, which is what social scientists call this continuous, low-level, background connectivity. It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his or her mood through actions—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye.

Clive Thompson, a contributing writer to the New York Times and author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, calls this “the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update—each individual bit of social information—is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your colleagues’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. The ambient information becomes ‘a type of ESP,’ an invisible dimension floating over us.”¹⁶ It’s a new dimension of energy floating between us.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators, refers to “algorithmic authority,” meaning that if many people are pointing to the same thing at the same time, it’s probably worth paying attention to.¹⁷ Think of it like in-real-life trending. Does constant updating sound like a vice of vain people with nothing better to do? Paula Thornton, a design thinker focused on humane ways to work, points out, “In the machine world no one would imagine doing away with the conveyor belt. Updates are the conveyor belts of information in a service organization.”¹⁸

The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.
—Keith Ferrazzi

That conveyer belt of information should be interesting to any organization with a large distributed workforce because it supports the dynamics, efficiency, and agility of a small company. It raises awareness of others within an organization and, with this, opportunities for learning, collaboration, and innovation.

Online spaces rich and vibrant with ambient information increase the quantity of tacit knowledge shared because they make you aware of what people are doing in a way that was not possible before.

Burt Kaliski, former director of EMC’s Innovation Network, and his team started planning for the company’s annual Innovation Conference by brainstorming ideas about the focus of the event on EMC|ONE. As that was settled, the team moved on to posting and refining event details. Then they launched their innovation submission process on EMC|ONE and received more than 900 submissions from passionate EMC employees throughout the world who felt so comfortable in the community that they were even eager to post their submissions on the site for others to review, comment on, and provide suggestions.¹⁹

“In the machine world no one would imagine doing away with the conveyor belt. Updates are the conveyor belts of information in a service organization.”

—Paula Thornton

Questions to consider:

• Have you provided a method that makes it easy for people to have complete, interesting, and useful profiles, including pictures?

• Do you allow tagging of files and other artifacts, and does your system provide for a loose “Folksonomy”, rather than a rigid taxonomy?

Does part of your system allow for continuous, in-line, and real-time updating and are people encouraged to share what they’re doing; that is, to “work out loud?”

Socialness

If, as Woody Allen said, 80 percent of success is showing up, at least 10 percent of the remaining 20 requires engaging with those around you who can contribute to your success.

If people don’t talk and support each other and build off one another, social tools don’t provide much benefit. Interaction among people amplifies individual contributions. Articles on similar subjects can change from noise to sound when they’re synthesized and cross-linked.

The first and largest integrated not-for-profit medical practice in the world, the Mayo Clinic employs more than 57,000 physicians, scientists, researchers, allied health professionals, and residents. The world-class staff, deeply entrenched in labor-intensive intellectual work, aim to create a culture of collaborative care—with social media as a new and vital resource.

Monty Flinsch, who has led technical initiatives at the Mayo Clinic’s central campus in Rochester, Minnesota, for more than a decade, sees the endless potential of social learning to establish and support relationships between people and departments. He doesn’t see these tools used to develop knowledge, rather he sees them as a critical component for Mayo clinicians to make vital connections.²⁰

A physical scientist by training, Flinsch likens status updates to cloud seeding, the distribution of silver iodide that changes the energy in clouds and leads to rain. When people ask a question or post a link to a resource across Mayo’s internal social tools, their open sharing creates a place where ideas get crystallized. Ideas ignite more sharing and then normal human relationships take off. People go to lunch, talk on the phone, or invite each other to see something they are working on.

Social learning is simply to learn with others and through others. This is natural, omnipresent, collaborative learning.
—Frédéric Domon

Because this happens more frequently and sooner than if someone had to make introductions, or they read about the challenge on a piece of paper near the elevator, people at Mayo are making more substantial contacts. They spark off of one another’s ideas. Connecting again online or in person reinvigorates the process and brings new energy to their communications. For busy people who need to find ways to manage their attention stream, updates seem little enough to not feel like a burden. It’s akin to having vibrant conversations without the time commitment. It’s sufficiently lightweight to fit into the spaces between the critical work people do.

Physicians at Mayo, like people in many professions, face a huge number of system alerts begging for their attention. Updates can become their unified activity stream, which they can look at through the corner of an eye and receive alerts and gain an ambient awareness of conversations going on. Rather than being bombarded with notices that blood work is complete, a room is ready, or a package has arrived, this unified stream is there when they are ready to review it. Although some people believe that updates add to chaos and perceive it as just more noise, others find threads of relevance in their first few experiences. They use it as a digest, checking in once in a while and getting an idea where the institution is on a topic. One more blip isn’t distracting; they view updates when they have time. They can engage when appropriate.

Ideas get tossed out, and some fall to the bottom of the pile (when a reply or conversation isn’t required). Others stick, and engagement ensues. Messages touch a nerve or mix with threads that keep popping up, forming a pulse of the institution. When there’s internal rumbling, you can sense it across the stream. Ideas are refined in the space, issues get aired, and people feel connected to one another and to the vibe of the organization. They feel connected and social in a way that reminds them they’re colleagues, not just people working at the same place.

Monty Flinsch says, “These technologies create energy that is self-sustaining. Social sharing provides a simple way for people to connect, set ideas on fire, and make ideas rain.”

Questions to consider:

• Does your system utilize a micro-blogging or status update component so people can see what their colleagues and teammates are doing during the day?

• Does it allow for the integration of updates and alerts into its communications stream, so people can “pull,” rather than have “pushed” the information they need?

• Are you using a wiki or some other form of web-based collaborative tool that can preserve portions of your organization’s more explicit knowledge and information?

Relevance

What good are vibrant social exchanges if they aren’t pertinent to the people and mission of your organization?

The Jacksonville (Florida) Sheriff’s Office (JSO) strives to protect and serve its community by preventing crime and disorder, while guarding personal liberties. With a population of approximately 875,000 residents, 1,600 officers serve a consolidated area of 844 square miles. In order to effectively serve its citizens, all of the units within the office must work together, share information, and collaborate in real time, but the JSO found this to be difficult with only a static internal website.

By taking a social approach, they now have a central knowledge portal, making relevant resources accessible to the officers and detectives who need them. The JSO has improved the accuracy and value of crime analyses by increasing real-time collaboration between officers and analysts. Crime patterns and trends are easily searchable with tags. Former crime analysis unit manager Jamie Roush says, “By incorporating social, we shifted the crime analysis and distribution process from one-way communication to a collaborative effort, creating an efficient feedback loop.”²¹ For crime analysis, the key to effectiveness is having accurate information and making sure the detectives and officers receive the information and can contribute to the analysis process.

When Roush decided she wanted to implement a social solution that would eventually be available agency wide, she bypassed the top-down method of change management that often exists within law-enforcement agencies. She made the officers and detectives an integral part of the change by showing them the technology, highlighting the benefits it offered them, and providing full access. By explaining the reasons behind, and the benefits of, using the technology, and then allowing employees to play a critical role in making the change, the Sheriff’s Office increased communication and collaboration that became a part of the officers’ daily flow of work.

Traditionally in law enforcement, crime analysts distribute their reports through email or a static internal website. The JSO realized that with these distribution methods, the reports spiraled into a “black hole.” The email recipients often deleted the emails because they didn’t see the value. Sometimes, the analyst would receive a phone call from a recipient and would then incorporate the feedback, rewrite the analysis, and start the entire cycle again. The JSO wanted to ensure that the right information was distributed to the appropriate people and wouldn’t just be deleted.

Now, a crime analyst posts information to a wiki page in a workspace, officers provide feedback in real time, which the analyst then incorporates and immediately shares with all of the officers. Using social makes this process more efficient and accurate, because all of the officers can contribute, view each other’s suggestions, and work together to build a complete analysis.

Roush called their new platform Wikid 94. She wanted the name to be catchy and relevant; the “94” speaks to the actual signal used for collecting information. It has links to all the main patrol and investigative areas. Officers enter all patterns and series information onto the appropriate pages, so the most current updates are always available. Tagging helps information on crime trends, and patterns get to the relevant pages for officers to view. Even those who aren’t frequent social media users off the job recognize the value Wikid 94 adds to their work, and its use has become second nature.

Success requires more than brilliant analysts and the understanding of policing and police managers—it requires a system fueled by information and data. JSO’s strength is their work environment, their system. Prior to taking a social approach, JSO’s analysts spent at least half their time extracting, cleaning, and coding data so that they could analyze it. They needed a system that is fast and flexible because “speed is the currency of law enforcement analysis.”²² Social approaches are being used for law enforcement, public engagement, and for investigative purposes.

Studies show that 87 percent of the time social media, when used as a probable cause for a search warrant, holds up in court, and 67 percent of people believe information obtained via social media can help solve investigations more quickly. Social media may be one of the best modern tools to improve police work. In one case in Jacksonville, Roush, who was monitoring Twitter, saw tweets about a shooting at a mall. Only after a little while, she said, did she get a ring from her traditional police scanner, saying the shooting had occurred.

Questions to consider:

The interconnected, interactive nature of social learning exponentially amplifies the rate at which crucial content can be shared.
—Abhipsa Mishra

• Did you communicate with, and do you continue to communicate with, the people who you expect will benefit from a collaborative, social learning environment?

• Do you know what their needs are or which of their processes are responsible for the most aggravation and disruption in the organization?

• Have you carefully scrutinized how your system works, and what components are available, with an eye toward the specific ways in which they’ll be used by your people?

Taken together, an online community or social network’s degree of vibrancy, socialness, and relevance offer a distinctive way to measure the success of a collaborative environment. More powerfully though, these criteria can serve as objective measurements of the quality and reputation of a person’s or group’s contributions. Are people contributing? How, when, where, and how often? Are they interacting in a positive way? Sentiment analysis could even be applied. Does editing have a positive tone? Are people discussing, cross-linking, and debating in a healthy way?

Such measures allow organizations to evaluate employees not by their direct output (number of reports, accounts won, or hours on the job), but by how well they facilitate and enable a virtual collaborative community and contribute to something larger than themselves.

Strategy 5. Ensure People Are Digitally Literate

Organizations often find that some of their employees aren’t working in social ways because they don’t know how. Find catalysts to make their experience more positive. Some just need hands-on training, as they may not currently use social tools. Others will benefit from coaching on how to work in relationship-oriented ways.

It’s only after you’re deeply into your work that you may realize some people need to increase their overall digital literacy.

A Dutch-based financial institution had set as a corporate priority to transform their IT department across the globe. Central to that was creating a collaboration platform. With it, they created an ambassador program and a consulting practice only to realize that digital literacy had to be addressed.

Alvaro Caballero, who was collaborative program manager, recalls, “we realized one of the reasons for the low adoption rates was not a lack of awareness about the tools, but a lack of understanding on how to use them productively. When employees said they didn’t know how to use any of this, they really meant it.”

Putting into practice the approach pioneered by Sugata Mitra, education researcher from India and winner of the 2013 TED Prize, Caballero and his team created a series of six-week programs for anyone in the company to steep themselves in the digital age. They put out an open invitation through their usual communications channels and organized everyone who applied into cohorts with specific start dates.

In a company of over 50,000 people, and an IT department that made up one quarter of its global workforce, the aspiration was for those who went through the program to teach others what they’d learned.

Caballero worked with a small team to create digital spaces for dialogue and reflection around key topics of digital use in an enterprise.

Networks are the new companies.
—Nilofer Merchant

The program was composed of weekly topics, starting with a conversation. Connected together in a closed community inside the company’s social platform, which Caballero describes as “sort of a TweetChat or stream of comments,” the people in the group talked about what they wanted to learn.

By admitting in this small private group that you didn’t know what hashtags were, let alone how to use them, or what was the difference between a blog and working out loud, people began to trust one another, knowing they weren’t alone. Something one person didn’t know might be well understood by another, so they also could begin thinking about how they might help each other.

Then participants received a trigger question about one of these topics. They stepped out of the conversation to investigate on their own and came back to contribute to the ongoing live discussion. Some brought back links to posts they found particularly useful. Others came back with more questions, videos, comments, and experiences.

The program facilitators, two in each session, didn’t use materials or lessons, per se. They followed the exchanges closely, asked interesting questions. They pointed out how people were building on one another’s answers, and how to say something for others to build upon. They also asked questions to surface how participants could apply what they were doing into their daily work.

After the group session was over, participants were assigned a series of collaborative tasks and it was their responsibility to decide how and when to do them within the following week—together whenever possible.

One task was to create a profile in a social platform. While just filling out a form could be seen as completing the task, the teams chatted between themselves as they did it. That prompted them to begin also seeing the benefit in writing short descriptions of their work, something that wasn’t asked for in the profile, and adding links to materials other people might get value from.

The profile question alone prompted the groups to have more in-depth conversations about additional digital literacies. For instance, “Is it OK not to include a picture?” and “If you need one, what makes a good picture?”

Other collaborative tasks included looking back through blog posts and comments, replying to status updates and commenting, asking questions of their networks, working out loud, and identifying the value of connecting with others.

The goal of this reflection was to help participants connect personally with the content as they talked about it with their cohort mates. It also ensured they began feeling like they could work with others, passing this knowledge along to others interested in increasing their digital literacy. The post-discussion analysis and teaching mindset were key to the program’s success.

The facilitated sessions lasted for an hour and usually generated 90 to 120 comments. Although the design team tried various size groups, they learned over time that a cohort of seven to eight people worked best. They created groups of 10 and, inevitably, two or three didn’t attend each time.

Participants were also encouraged to consider themselves future instructors. Whatever they ended up creating would be used as guidance for the next group. This helped everyone practice in the co-authoring process and instilled a sense of pride among the participants, knowing they were building something of value for their colleagues. Most importantly, they made sure there was time for personal reflection and analysis, core to their retaining and using what they’d learned.

At the end of the program, the facilitators picked out of the homework some of the groups’ breakthrough moments. After a little bit of styling and editing, Caballero and his team created booklets with pictures in them on nice glossy paper. They gave each participant several of the booklets so they could share with colleagues or family. The books bridged the digital and physical world, providing each participant an artifact to prompt additional conversations about digital literacy and working together online.

Social Learning: because situation beats instruction.
—Charles Jennings

Strategy 6. Focus on Increasing Collective Smarts

Watch a group of 4-year-olds build a skyscraper made of cardboard, and you might think anything is possible. One offers up her vision, another gets the boxes, and a third clears the space in anticipation of something big. No one taught them their roles or pointed out the opportunity. They each saw something greater than they could do alone (or at least in the time before playgroup ends), and they joined in, collectively.

While social learning may at times feel foreign because of our years learning alone at school, collaboration is something we’ve known how to do our entire lives. Working together to produce something more significant than one person can do alone is timeless. Relying on one another to get smarter is part of our DNA.

Modern collaboration tools, when used by several people simultaneously, enable a shift in individual thinking about the energy and intelligence we can produce together. Add to that the complex nature and urgency of problems facing organizations today, and we’re reminded there’s no time to waste.

“If you ask someone what data they want to share with whom, in a general fashion, people give up, overwhelmed,” says Adina Levin, collaborative software visionary. “But when tools enable people to share information about themselves, their organizations, and the urgent issues they face right now in the context of who they are meeting with and what they are working on, people make pretty good decisions and create real digital social networks.”²³

Ask people what they know and they’ll be hard pressed to articulate it. Put them in a situation where they are required to use their knowledge and recall is often immediate and complete.

Working together isn’t something new, but capturing perception, thinking, and the ideas needed to understand the full context of a problem to produce something that remains up-to-date is revolutionary.

Doug Engelbart, the father of personal computing and for over a half-century an advocate for the creation of collaborative tools to augment collective work, believed the answers are right in front of us—if only we could reach them.²⁴ What if groups of people could access their collective knowledge quickly when facing a decision, sorting through all other noise, and keying in on the most relevant information? It would vastly improve our ability to deal with complex, urgent problems—to get the best possible understanding of a situation, including the best possible solutions.

The success of any size organization or team is based on its collective IQ, a measure of how well people work collectively on important problems and challenges—in other words, its collective smarts. It becomes a measure of how effective we are at tackling complex, urgent problems and opportunities and how effectively a group can concurrently develop, integrate, and apply its knowledge toward its mission.

Questions to consider:

• Have you made it clear, and do you reinforce the notion, that collaboration is not seen as “cheating” and that everyone is not merely allowed to work together, but is also actively encouraged to do so?

• Have you identified specific work-related processes you know can be made better through the active cooperation of the people who touch it?

• Have you thought of developing occasional challenges and opportunities for people to work together toward a goal that isn’t necessarily work related?

Make Informed Decisions in Real Time

Good decisions are the heart and soul of any successful, fast-moving organization, and the more informed the decisions, the better they are likely to be. Although most people say they want input from co-workers and staff prior to making a final call, often it’s just too hard to do in a timely manner. Real-time input on decisions is yet another way that social learning facilitates what people learn. Being able to access tacit knowledge from a wide range of people in the organization allows us to solicit opinions; ask questions; get pointers to more information; and see referrals, testimonials, benchmarking, and updates that relate to what we need to decide.

Question to consider:

• Have you created opportunities and methods whereby feedback can be sought from everyone in your organization who wishes to offer it and have you actually sought such feedback?

Create Opportunities to Reflect

Social media, by its nature and even its name, implies an outward connection. Look out. Look up. Look around. What about looking in? Online communities offer intrapersonal benefits for those paying attention to what they can learn about themselves.

Although the public visibility of an online community can be unsettling, there is a very positive result of incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the people we spoke with about their social media use described an unexpected side effect of self-discovery. Stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Zen concept of mindfulness.

Having an online audience for self-reflection can prompt people to work harder at it and describe it more accurately in more interesting ways—the status update as a literary form.

Laura Fitton, microsharing maven and co-author of Twitter for Dummies, points out that her constant status updating has even made her “a happier person, a calmer person” because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. “It drags you out of your own head,” she says.²⁵ In an age of virtual awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly will be yourself.

Whom do you influence? Look at the people who have chosen to follow what you’re writing, and you’ll begin to get a picture of who takes an interest in the areas you focus on. Someone you have admired for a long time may be looking at what you do; someone you’d never considered talking with about a topic near to your heart might be chiming in when you don’t expect it. Someone who follows you may consistently ask you to clarify or dig deeper into a theory when you explain something. This may help improve your writing or steer your work to assist more people.

Garden and Weed

Just as some people are terrific at encouraging their friends onto the dance floor, communities benefit from gardeners to nurture and tend to the proverbial soil. Plot out a community objective with a clearly defined purpose stating why people would want to join. Seed your community with appropriate content to encourage participation. Harvest and publicly recognize valuable contributions in order to reinforce behaviors and drive engagement.

Every online community benefits from people looking around, tending the soil, and clearing out the weeds. Those roles can be formal or informal, regular or periodic. They lend themselves to certain activities, too. Nancy White, co-author of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, points out that online group interactions do not always happen spontaneously. They require care and nurturing: facilitation. The core of facilitation is to serve the group and assist it in reaching its goals or purpose. Some describe this role as a gardener, a conductor, the distributed leadership of jazz improvisers, a teacher, or an innkeeper. It can be this and more.²⁶

Lee Levitt, Laird Popkin, and David Hatch write, “Communities are organic in nature and [you] can’t make them successful or force them to grow. [You] can only provide the fertile ground on which a community may grow, and then provide some gentle guidance to help the group thrive.”²⁷

Community managers (often the formal title for facilitators) need to be genuine, authentic communicators, tending to their gardens no matter the weather or season. White adds, “Facilitation is a balance between functions that enhance the environment and content, create openness and opportunity, and protect members from harassment. It involves the sacred rituals around freedom of individual expression while preserving something of ‘the common good.’ It is juggling, tightrope walking, often without a net.

These multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissance—a period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives.
—Henry Jenkins

“Facilitators foster member interaction, provide stimulating material for conversations, keep the space cleaned up and help hold the members accountable to the stated community guidelines, rules, or norms. They pass on community history and rituals. They hold the space for the members. Perhaps more importantly, hosts often help community members do these things for themselves.”

When members of a community begin taking on these roles themselves, they are gaining both the skills and experience to improve how they work and learn with people outside the community and their organizations.

Although many organizations begin by adopting outward-facing social media strategies, putting social capabilities on their externally facing websites, there are advantages to beginning inside first. While at EMC, prior to Akamai, Jamie Pappas helped to launch EMC|ONE with a key goal of driving employee proficiency with social media tools internally, without the added pressures and expectations that come with external collaboration. “It’s much easier to develop the etiquette and best practices and course correct, if needed, when you’re among respected colleagues. More people are willing to take a chance, take risks, and learn how to use the tools in an environment with supportive colleagues all learning at the same time,” says Pappas.

To get as many people as possible ready for social tools, the consumer innovation team at Humana created a series of self-guided training modules for employees to learn about various social media tools without becoming overwhelmed. People can spend a little time each day to get up to speed and gain a sense of how these resources can help them. “LinkedIn in 15 Minutes a Day,” for instance, gives employees a chance to learn enough to test it on their own. Other 15-minute courses introduce the basics of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. The team has also created modules on subjects such as RSS feeds and readers, blogging, search engine optimization, and social marketing campaigns. They post these modules in an online community-like space called the Social Media Commons, designed specifically as a place where people can practice and learn.

Make Connections

How is community created online? By connecting and creating a better world together. You’re meeting someone in person for the first time and go visit their online profile so you get a sense of who they are. Viewing a person’s profile should essentially provide the same feel as visiting his or her office—complete with pictures of the kids on the desk and certifications and awards on the walls.

You’re searching for who in your organization knows anything about gravity-feed drip irrigation. You search in the social network to find if anyone has talked about that in their profile or has posted something about it in a conversation thread. Profiles include the industry and sector each person focuses on; they provide a way for people to quickly find a French-speaking health specialist or a Spanish-speaking logistician. If people want to connect with parents of twins or a Hispanic employee network in the Midwest, they can do that with a few keystrokes.

In the middle of a conversation you realize that the person you’re talking with really should know another of your colleagues. What better place to introduce them than online? Social spaces enable people to introduce colleagues to one another. When they meet there, they can also learn from their profiles what they’ve shared publicly and get a sense both of why you made the introduction and where to begin the conversation.

New hires can easily find five people who went to the same college they did, three who worked for the same company, and two who grew up in their small town. Whenever someone with a similar history joins the organization, he or she can get an alert. With the ability to make these kinds of connections, cold and impersonal quickly turns warm and welcoming.

Strategy 7. Work Out Loud

“We need to do better, not at documenting what people do, but how they get things done,” says Jane Bozarth, author of Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud. “People talk about their work all the time. How can we make that more visible?” People have a hard time answering the question, “Can you tell me what you do?” All too often they end up just listing activities, for all the help that offers. Bozarth encourages people to instead ask (and answer), “What are you working on?” “What problems did you run into?” “What went easily? What turned out to be more difficult than you thought?” “Where did you have to stop to look for something, or someone?” She adds, “We could learn a lot if we did less telling everyone how to do their work and asking them to show us what they do. People talk about their work all the time. Supporting them as they show their work is a great way to help them keep talking.”²⁸

Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing self is enlightenment. But the good thing is one leads to the other.
—Lao Tzu

John Stepper, managing director at Deutsche Bank and author of Working Out Loud: For a Better Career and Life, says, “Working out loud is working in an open, generous, connected way so you can build a purposeful network, become more effective, and access more opportunities. Anyone can learn how to do it. Most people, though, find it difficult to get started or to develop new habits that will allow them to realize the benefits.”²⁹

Bryce Williams, social collaboration consultant at Eli Lilly, defines this practice with a simple formula:³⁰

Working Out Loud = Observable Work + Narrating Your Work

Stepper describes WOL as having five dimensions:

1. Making your work visible

2. Making work better

3. Leading with generosity

4. Building a social network

5. Making it all purposeful.

“Because there is an infinite amount of contributing and connecting you can do, you need to make it purposeful in order to be effective,” says Stepper. A goal might be as simple as, “I want more recognition in my firm” or “I’d like to explore opportunities in another location.” With plenty of room for serendipity, this focuses your learning, your writing, your sharing, and your connections.

Sheila Babnis at Roche explains working out loud as a way of working that gives her better access to information. Along the way, she also gets a real feel for what’s happening inside and outside of her organization so she can make better decisions and solve problems faster. She sees it as the “key to building and strengthening relationships, helping to identify the right connections, and having the right conversations that open the door to co-creation.”

Part of her job is experimenting and exploring—and while the idea of working out loud was initially interesting, it was also a little uncomfortable. “How could I possibly find the time, with everything on my plate, to go to yet another online place and openly share my thoughts and what I am working about? I was a little more than skeptical at the outset,” she says.

“But I decided to give it a trial run and see what happens. I blocked time on my calendar to share what I was working on with my community and also asked for feedback. I slowly found myself sharing work that was not yet complete. I started getting responses, which allowed me to take more risks. Now, the more I work out loud (and engage with what others are doing) the more fluent I am becoming.

“While at first I was uneasy posting everything that was going on in my head and recapping my meetings online, now it seems normal. Working in Pharma and making an impact in transforming drug development has made me realize that I would like to play a larger role in transforming healthcare. By working out loud, I am open to new exciting opportunities with a future-oriented leadership team changing the world.”³¹

Observable Work + Narrating Your Work = Working Out Loud.
—Bryce Williams

If people are working and sharing out loud, you may discover that some people in your organization are ready for new roles, new responsibilities, and new job descriptions.

Rather than your talent development department employing trainers, why not community managers? Rather than hiring instructional designers, why not curators? Be open to radically altering the portfolio and attributes of your teams.

“Almost all the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine,” says Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative and Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. “These people aren’t schmoozing at cocktail parties; they’re too busy for that. They’re cranking away in their studies, their laboratories, or their cubicles, but instead of maintaining absolute secrecy and hoarding their work, they’re open about what they’re working on, and they’re consistently posting bits and pieces of their work, their ideas, and what they’re learning online.”³²

Strategy 8. Earn and Build Trust

As organizations switch to a decentralized or distributed model, transparency from company leaders is a refreshing approach that builds trust and imparts critical insights. When employees are geographically dispersed and “walking the floor” isn’t an option, companies use video to reach out in authentic ways.

Status updates and video allows leaders to connect more emotionally than through a memo or an email, and it’s more personal. Videos can be documentary style, or they can be video blogs, town hall meetings, or even company newsreels that cut through corporate spin and deliver information without fluff. They can be quick talking points, questions and answers, or personal day-in-the-life narratives.

Employees often respond more favorably to a CEO’s unscripted comments, filmed by a member of the communication team on a smartphone, than to a glitzy, professionally shot, heavily scripted video. The more authentic and unfiltered the message, the more credible it generally is.

When two of the world’s largest steel manufacturers merged in 2006, Arcelor and Mittal used video to address employees’ concerns about the new 320,000-person organization. Short documentaries addressed concerns about layoffs and the merger. The videos became a catalyst for conversations about the changes both inside and outside of the organizations, fostering additional support from the market, shareholders, and citizens. Over time, Arcelor-Mittal launched its own web TV network, loaded with videos and candid conversations with executives and the men and women at the heart of the company sharing their own experiences, challenges, and aspirations.

Face Naysayers

While at NASA, Kevin Jones once led a meeting of five people, one of whom didn’t like that they were trying to use a collaborative tool. “I hate this,” she said, “and you will never get me to use this! In fact, I dare you to convince me I should use this.”

Near the end of the meeting, a big smile came across her face and she said, “Do you mean that I could…” and she described a solution to a business problem she was having. When she realized a major problem she had been facing could be resolved by using the online community, out of pure joy she clapped her hands, laughed, and said, “I get it! You convinced me! I love this!” And what did she do? She became an advocate and brought those around her along with her.

Build trust with critics by focusing attention on improving work. Help them overcome their fears. Work with them to understand working out loud isn’t for sharing what you had for breakfast; rather it’s actually being smarter when you work. Once you break through the emotional barrier, naysayers may first understand and then embrace this approach. Why embrace? Because you will have solved a business problem that particularly irritates them. Suddenly, it isn’t such a bad thing.

You don’t really build trust; trust grows naturally based on a pattern of trustworthy interactions.
—David Kelly

Former critics may just turn around and bring other naysayers along. This happens over and over again. Whomever you talk to, don’t overwhelm them. Don’t tell them they need to start blogging and responding to all comments. Or that instead of taking notes on paper, as they have become accustomed to, they need to take notes inside of their social platform for everyone to see. Starting there might very well turn them off. Instead, give them the next step. It might be adding files to your collaborative tool rather than attaching them in an email. It might be starting a discussion rather than a mass email.

This is why taking a personal approach is so important. It is hard to give people the next step in a group, because they are all in different places. Plus, it is difficult to ask for commitment on a large level. One on one, you can ask for that commitment and get it. Work with individuals and let them help with the change.

Burst Forward

Aaron Silvers, a partner in MakingBetter, describes social networking as an act of sharing actions. He began using Twitter to connect with peers and industry leaders who could help solve his toughest on-the-job challenges. He was working at the industrial supply company Grainger and saw that short status updates could add value to Grainger’s education initiatives and provide people across the organization new ways to engage. Says Silvers, “Once Twitter made sense to me, I saw its potential as a tool to connect employees to each other. Maybe not Twitter itself, but at least a tool like it. Something that could be secure yet accessible could kick start social networking in an organization.”³³

Then a senior executive at Grainger saw the media attention over Twitter and signed up for the grassroots enterprise community Silvers helped set up. Two hours later, the executive posted to his company blog that he had created an internal account and that he’d begun using it to talk with employees. By 8 a.m. the following day, the system had 306 users. Within a few weeks, more than a thousand people had joined in.

A year later, more than 3,000 people were sharing back and forth, many using the system for far more than learning what’s on the leaders’ minds. People shared stories and observations, what they’d learned with customers, and how they could improve their work. Social sharing has changed the company’s culture dramatically. Silvers maintains that culture change was not the explicit goal; learning was. People at all levels share what they’re working on and have conversations on topics they feel passionate about. This gives everyone an opportunity to learn from those who are willing to share their expertise.

Too frequently organizational knowledge sharing mirrors the news cycle society around us, in which we share the highs and lows, ignoring the ordinary stuff in the middle. It’s in that middle ground that people make sense of the work going on around them, understand how to help fulfill the company vision, and know where to turn to find help.

These slender messages are interstitial; they inhabit and fill the seams of our organizations. Learning often entails asking people how to do things. The trouble is we customarily ask the person closest to us rather than someone known to have the right answer. Social sharing helps us reach the right people without even knowing who they are. You can also enlist help en masse by asking large groups of people to focus on the same issue for a short burst of time to find a creative solution quickly.

Trust is the social lubricant that makes community possible.
—Cliff Figallo

The threads help us collectively construct understanding, foster new connections, and grow existing bonds, making for more agile perspectives, tighter teams, and resilient morale.

These tools work similarly to how we converse while passing one another in the hallway, representing a live ecosystem that shifts from moment to moment, where it is easier, faster, and more effective for us to brain dump as events happen.

Strategy 9. Use Rich Media to Look People in the Eye

According to Cisco research, by 2018 online video will be the most highly adopted form of media. No matter which industry you are in, and regardless of the use case, you most likely already use online video, or plan to start soon. 

The Internet has enabled people to be just-in-time opportunists, getting information when they need it. Employees have that same expectation at work. Short clips that can be watched or listened to on a computer or mobile device are sometimes the best way to deliver that kind of experience fast.

Large organizations have been using audio and video for a long time in marketing and training. What sets the new social media-sharing solutions apart is that they can be fast, broad, and free.

“Once Twitter made sense to me, I saw its potential as a tool to connect employees to each other. Maybe not Twitter itself, but at least a tool like it. Something that could be secure yet accessible could kick start social networking in an organization.”

—Aaron Silvers

Media sharing, especially video sharing, can provide a captivating way to convey a human voice, rich with emotion and expression, that people trust instinctively more than words on paper or still photos alone can accomplish. Following are some reasons organizations are turning to rich media.

Promote the Best Examples of Employee-Generated Video

When employees can create, comment on, and share video clips, the most effective content increases in value. At CENTURY 21 Real Estate, David Birnbaum’s team had a hard time getting people to upload their own videos to the company’s social portal. “Even though real-estate agents often use videos these days—for their local listings and to convey they are experts in certain neighborhoods—they weren’t uploading videos in our internal system, showing best practices to other agents. We wondered if it was because they didn’t want to give away their secrets to other agents; a competitive advantage. When we asked, the answer wasn’t what we anticipated. We heard there was no incentive or reward for sharing the videos.

“So we turned their competitive nature into an advantage for all of us. Each month we featured one video in a prominently displayed blog post and named the agent who created the video ‘contributor of the month.’ Agents are proud of this and so they submitted more, then they ping one another asking, ‘did you see me?’ People wanted to be selected—and to share their best practices conveyed they are the best.”

Many organizations jumpstart viral adoption of videos by giving certain clips prominence around the organization. They use tools that allow people to embed clips in email, on team pages, and in other parts of the social network. Some even ask for volunteers willing to spend off-hours finding the best videos on the internal site and rating them to give them more exposure.

Showcase Team Accomplishments

When the sales team has a big win or the development team passes an important milestone, someone inevitably captures the celebration through video and shares it far and wide. At large meetings, encourage people throughout the event to use their smartphones to videotape almost everything. Then show onstage how the event met the expectations and objectives set out at the beginning. This rallies the troops; shares lessons from those practicing their sales pitches, such as presenters in sessions talking about an important upcoming product release, and showcases a group of people deeply interested in helping their organization succeed.

Make Progress With Pictures

Sharing stories using visuals isn’t new. Pictures on rocks and cave walls date as far back as 40,000 years. Even before our predecessors congregated in communities, they drew pictures to tell narratives that conveyed movement and meaning and passed on wisdom across space and time. These stories allowed us to evolve by communicating key details and messages not as easily passed on through other means.

With quality cameras dropping in price and video capabilities now built into more mobile devices, our ability to share still and moving images has expanded from down the path to around the world. We can now see faces and activities almost as easily as we can hear voices over the phone. Storytelling, which has always been central to the human condition, now travels across new forms of media to help us learn from, and connect to, one another.

Anything that can be digitized can be accessed and distributed on the Internet or an intranet. Videos, audio files, podcasts, slideshows, and digital pictures can all be used to improve business processes and collaboration. As bandwidth increases and compression algorithms improve, a migration from text-based content to full-motion video ensues. At the same time, more powerful, compact, and mobile access devices make it easier to find and learn from relevant content whenever it’s needed.

Crowdsource how we learn: See one. Do one. Teach one. Share one. Social, relevant, meaningful learning.
—Cathy Davidson

In the past, only businesses with deep pockets and the right technology could bring corporate stories to life, broadcast time-sensitive news to all employees, reach people in far-flung locations, and generally increase the impact of what they convey.

Organizations of all sizes can now afford the technology to stream video directly to employees’ desktops. No longer do they need to rely on business satellite networks or on distributing content on VHS tapes or DVDs in the vague hope employees will make the effort to watch them.

They can now provide rich stories and ad-hoc video clips from the field, or they can post short, online updates throughout the day—Headline News Network style—replacing a daily newsletter as stories are blogged, tweeted, and commented on online, by anyone.

Media sharing is more than a tool or a broadcast medium. It’s more than the multimedia CD-ROMs of years past. It’s a way to foster interaction and sociability, another way to cultivate community—a community that extends to co-workers, partners, suppliers, customers, and other people interacting in the workplace. Media capabilities open new opportunities to interact, share, produce, and collaborate.

Videos communicate in a powerful and succinct way. Images are far superior to print or digital text to convey the totality of a situation or effort. Watching a mechanic assemble an engine can be more valuable than reading 10 books on the topic. Video engages your eyes, ears, and imagination to help you picture yourself solving a problem.

People-powered content provides buzz and insight. As more people walk around with camera-enabled smartphones and install webcams and microphones, employee-generated content will offer greater insights to companies.

Phyllis Myers, producer of the NPR radio show Fresh Air, characterized viral video as a “sharing experience” instead of the old “shared experience” that broadcast networks and publishers typically offer. Rather than waiting for interesting content from media giants, people increasingly reach out to pull content they want.

They can find a broad assortment of free videos from commercial sites, including YouTube and Vimeo, as well as their organization’s clips created with widely available, in-house-focused software.

If a single picture is worth a thousand words, widely available videos on an endless array of topics are priceless. A bottom-up approach to employee-generated video means just about anything related to your organization can and will be captured and shared. Furthermore, the YouTube factor, where people celebrate wacky and compelling stories, means as long as video is interesting and authentic, homegrown will often do. As many podcasters have already found out, content is more important than presentation. If you have something to say that is relevant and genuinely interesting, people will watch.

Eliminate Physical Boundaries

An internal survey at Marathon Oil, with operations spanning three continents, showed that communications from executives weren’t delivering the personal impact desired to inspire and inform, and there were no effective ways to gather feedback.³⁴

Marathon Oil also faced the challenge of effectively and affordably training dispersed workers on topics ranging from complicated IT issues to how to properly use a safety mask. For years, Marathon employees accessed documents and presentations over the company network. When Marathon wanted to ensure a high level of participation, a trainer went to visit employees on site. This was expensive and resource intensive.

Embrace good ideas and allow your people to experiment, which includes the possibility of failure.

To address this challenge, Marathon originally decided to deliver live video broadcasts over satellite. Several expensive broadcasts later, the company switched to affordable and far-reaching streaming media.

Using an in-house production studio, two dedicated streaming servers, and rich media creation software, Marathon was able to provide live daily streaming webcasts and a library of archived presentations available on demand. The presentations are scalable and can reach all employees at once. Typically, 1,200 to 1,400 employees participate in live broadcasts, and as many as 8,000 view on-demand content.

The technology is being used for training in business integrity, hardware operation, legal issues, records retention, wellness advice, health, driver safety, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and instruction on software updates. Video brings Marathon executives’ personalities and inflections right to employees at their workstations, wherever that may be.

Recruit Talent

Prior to being acquired by Accenture, 300-person Gestalt LLC, a software developer in Camden, New Jersey, that serves the defense and energy markets, ran a video contest to spark interest in the company among highly skilled potential recruits.

The contest was open to all employees interested in creating a video and posting it on YouTube. A companywide vote determined the winner, who could opt for an Apple computer or $2,000 in cash. John Moffett won the contest with a 90-second video called PatrolNET Woes about a mission through the nearby countryside to “find people.”

The video contest encouraged people to create messages that ultimately promoted the company and its culture and climate and was played for the world to see. In a company whose tag line is “value beyond the sum of its parts,” this was pushing even its comfort zone. The CEO, Bill Loftus, who admits he was initially nervous about the video contest idea, said “Bigger companies might try to control the message, but I believe a company’s true image comes from what people really are, not spin from the marketing department.” In fact, Gestalt sent a link to the winning video to 16,000 people in its talent database and to various headhunting firms as well.

During the first weekend of sending out the links, the company received 4,000 hits from its candidate database and 750 people reintroduced themselves to the firm. The videos showed the employees’ energy and excitement, which positioned the company well in a very competitive market.³⁵

Cultivate Culture

A Silicon Valley startup uses video blogging on its intranet for employees and employees’ friends and family members to post advice on everything from finding hotels to transforming their cubes into livable habitats. One video is a tour of local eateries, pointing out the specials and comparing how fast their service is.

The videos provide immediate, actionable solutions to common issues facing a young and lean team working around the clock. None of the videos took much time to make, and they were mostly created when someone thought, “I bet my co-workers would benefit from knowing this.” The videos also give new employees a sense of the culture and challenges they’ll face to show them how to solve problems on their own.

Many failed initiatives were explained as the result of “culture problems.”
—Dave Gray

They have also captured their founders talking about how they came up with the idea for the organization and followed people around on their first few days of work as a way to connect people to people and ideas to their originators.

In less than a year, nearly 100 videos were created for fewer than 50 employees. As the startup gains momentum and additional staff, the company plans to incorporate instant video making into its training, human resources, and technical development functions, in the hope of ensuring that the vibrant social culture stays that way, no matter how large the company grows.

Capture Corporate Knowledge Through Expert Interviews

As some of the longtime gurus of a company head toward retirement, solving big problems and focusing on what they do best, newer employees have little opportunity to learn from them. When a senior developer gives notice, have a new member of the communications team trail her for a week, discovering everything she does, asking questions, and capturing for others to learn from in the years ahead. Through interviews or even simply capturing them in action, media sharing can transform people’s experiences, stories, and living examples into easily consumable knowledge before it walks out the door.

If you do something very simple, such as implement a system in which your people know where to go to get the information they need to get their jobs done, you can save people a couple of minutes a day. You generate savings when your people don’t need to search through their email because they can go to a community and search easily through media clips on topics that pertain to them. Right there they also find news about the organization and tips from their teammates, which save more time. You can calculate that a couple of minutes per person per day add up to 45 minutes per employee per month. That equals nine hours per year. These are very conservative estimates of the time saved. That little calculation does not even include the benefits you can realize from improved quality and customer service. It’s just that simple.

“Bigger companies might try to control the message, but I believe a company’s true image comes from what people really are, not spin from the marketing department.”

—Bill

Loftus

Strategy 10. Curate to Focus Attention

The networks we live in extend the reach of our learning communities. In the Village of Schaumburg, Illinois, the citizens expect 24/7 engagement with their local government. Hoping to make information more searchable and sharable for employees to service demand, the Village looked to the power of social media to create a one-stop shop for communication and productivity. “[Our portal] keeps all employees in the loop, while also giving our senior management an easy way to gauge progress,” says Peter Schaak, Schaumburg’s director of IT.

Schaak’s team created curated posts, highlighting and packaging gems for the people in the Village from the flow of information as it passed through activity streams, wikis, blogs, articles, emails, periodicals, and videos. The direct connection of collaborative content with executable work requirements links information in a way that previously depended on each worker to match puzzle pieces needed to do a job—and in this case, to be a contributing citizen. Without people culling the “best of” together, websites can easily become ghost towns of information that are rarely visited. This approach continuously makes the ever-increasing knowledge stream relevant to people looking to others for guidance and care. Author and CEO of UK-based HT2, Ltd., Ben Betts succinctly describes such possibilities—where curation is a tool of work and where “we are all required to undertake continuous personal learning.”

David Kelly, CPLP, vice president of program development at the eLearning Guild, points out that there are different types of curation. They include aggregation, filtering, elevation, mash or match-ups, and timelines. “In recent years, the definition of curation has expanded [beyond museums], as more information shifts to a digital format. The sheer volume of digital information that is available makes it increasingly challenging to find the information you are interested in. Curation in a digital world isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.”³⁶

Think big, start small and iterate.
—Sumeet Moghe

“Curation helps individuals to capture information that is important to them and to wrap it in a context that gives more meaning than the message alone would impart,” Betts explains. “Typically, this is demonstrated with a by-line or a connection to ‘how we do things around here.’ Many of us do this in blogs, in tweets, and in other collections of knowledge that we share with the world. We take examples of methods, processes, or ideas and show the world how they worked out when we tried it for ourselves. We adapt theories and modify diagrams to show how we think things work out, or how we would do things differently. We build and critique to advance our understanding. We discuss and debate to defend our ideas or adapt them accordingly. We curate our understanding in public.”

As we continue reassessing roles throughout the organization, curation can ensure that people in education-focused jobs transition into positions where they become filters and amplifiers. As Betts describes this new curated world: “Much of this is tied up in making the tacit more explicit. Codifying your thoughts, committing to publishing, practicing good personal knowledge management will not only make you better at your current job, it could also make sure you never need to look for a job ever again.”³⁷