CHAPTER 11
ADDRESSING THE UNTAPPED POTENTIAL OF LEARNING PLATFORMS
Many people are talking about platforms, but hardly anyone is talking about learning platforms. It’s a big white space that could play a major role in unleashing our full potential.
As I suggested in the previous chapter, the primary objective of learning platforms is to help users learn faster together through action, feedback, and reflection, enabling them to evolve their practices over time to achieve more and more impact. True, other platforms also have learning potential. Aggregation platforms connect us with information, resources, and people that can answer our specific questions. Social platforms allow us to learn about people. And on mobilization platforms, we learn what works and what doesn’t work as we seek to achieve certain goals. But the learning that occurs on these other platforms is a by-product, not the platforms’ primary design goal.
THE DISTINCTIVE VALUE OF LEARNING PLATFORMS
In a world of mounting performance pressure, we need to move beyond “learning about” to “learning to do,” and from there to “learning to do better and better.” Once we venture into this territory, we need to find ways to learn together. No matter how smart any of us are individually, we’ll be a lot more creative and effective if we come together with others who are motivated to achieve more and more impact.
If we don’t find ways to do this, we’ll become increasingly stressed and marginalized. Not only is pressure mounting, but the rate at which the world is evolving is accelerating, so anything we learn today may become obsolete tomorrow. That means learning must be both lifelong and faster.
Consequently, platforms will become more and more central to our survival, much less our success, because they have a unique capability to accelerate learning. In the previous chapter, I mentioned platforms’ network effects. When more participants join a platform, its value increases exponentially. That happens even if none of the participants are learning. They can simply connect with more resources to meet their specific needs of the moment.
With learning platforms, a second order of network effects comes into play. These platforms go beyond increasing value by offering a growing range of choices. In addition, the more participants who join the platform, the greater and greater the diversity of experience, expertise, and perspectives everyone can tap into, so participants can learn faster. This second order of network effects ultimately has the greatest value and potential for exponential improvement. In fact, the ability to connect with a growing range of static resources has diminishing value in a rapidly changing world. We need to find environments where everyone is getting better faster.
Of the three levels of the power of pull that platforms can help unleash, I’ve so far focused on two: access and attract. The third level, achieve, provides the greatest impact. Achieve is about finding ways to activate more of our potential and pull it out of us. That comes from learning through action.
If we’re not learning, we won’t activate our potential; it will remain dormant. We have to make a conscious effort to pull it out of ourselves, and then we’ll make an amazing discovery: our potential is unlimited. The more potential we pull out of ourselves and apply in the world, the more we will find to tap. But to do that, we need help from learning platforms. Without them, we can never take full advantage of this third and most powerful level of pull.
HARNESSING THE VALUE OF LEARNING PLATFORMS
Here’s a key point: learning platforms offer only the potential to learn. To harness that potential, the participants have to be motivated. If we’re not motivated to learn, we’ll view learning as a burden rather than an asset.
Many of us would still like to believe that all that effort we invested in learning in the past was sufficient and that we are now entitled to simply reap its returns. Learning requires time and effort. In a world of mounting pressure, it’s natural to view that effort as just one more form of pressure to be avoided at all costs.
That’s where narrative and passion come into the picture. Without these two critical pillars, we’re unlikely to develop the motivation we need to take full advantage of learning platforms as they evolve. With these pillars, we experience an insatiable demand to learn faster together.
Once we have crafted or embraced an opportunity-based narrative, we are highly motivated to come together with others to achieve it. We are increasingly aware of the obstacles and roadblocks that stand in our way, challenging us to find creative new ways to overcome them. To meet the challenge, we need to learn why these obstacles are so challenging. We’re not going to figure that out on the first try; we will likely experience many failures along the way. But each failure is an opportunity to learn and find even more effective ways of moving forward. Learning is the key to progress.
When we have found and cultivated the passion of the explorer, we are committed to making an increasing impact in our chosen domain, so that it becomes a better and better place. To do that, we look for the challenges that goad us to achieve something new. We actively seek out others who can help us overcome the challenges. We are driven to learn together through action.
Each of the pillars of positive emotion can exist in isolation, but the goal is to bring all three of them together. People who are inspired by an opportunity-based narrative will often discover the passion of the explorer. Similarly, people with the passion of the explorer are often inspired by a large opportunity they see in their domain. When these two pillars come together, watch out! People who are driven by both passion and narrative to learn faster together are unstoppable. As they pursue a way to do so, they will catalyze the growth and evolution of learning platforms.
As they emerge and evolve, a powerful virtuous cycle will come into play. The availability of platforms that make learning easier and more fulfilling will inspire some of their users to discover their passion and evolve their narrative. As more and more of these inspired people become active on these platforms, the platforms will evolve to become more helpful to them, better serving their need to learn faster together. That will inspire still more people to find their passion and their narrative, and the cycle will become unstoppable.
KEY ATTRIBUTES OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING PLATFORMS
Perhaps the central design element and benefit of a learning platform is that it enables participants to create shared workspaces in which they come together in small groups, build trust-based relationships, and collaborate on initiatives. This brings us back to the concept of creation spaces, which I introduced in Chapter 5 in the context of movements. Creation spaces are present in successful social and political movements throughout history, as well as environments in which we see sustained extreme performance improvement, like extreme sports and online war games. Although these environments are diverse, participants have evolved very similar ways of organizing to learn faster together to achieve more impact. The basic unit of organization is a small group, typically consisting of three to fifteen members, who meet frequently to work on initiatives designed to achieve local impact. These impact groups then link together in an ever-expanding network of cells that can learn from each other and leverage each other’s efforts.
As the need to accelerate learning continues to unfold, impact groups will become the core unit of organization in every aspect of our lives—our personal growth efforts, our work environments, our communities, and the movements that will drive change in the world. We will need platforms that are more explicitly designed to support both the impact groups and the larger networks of groups.
In addition to providing the shared workspaces where groups convene and collaborate, the platforms can help scale the groups’ efforts by providing features enabling greater collaboration. These would likely include broader discussion forums, in which participants can direct their questions to the members of other groups, combined with directories that can help participants across the entire platform find each other based on their relevant experience or skill sets. Besides asking questions, forum participants can share stories about the initiatives they have already undertaken, describing what worked, what didn’t, and what key lessons they took away from the experiences.
Especially as these initiatives start to have more impact, they can inspire other participants to make even greater efforts. Feedback loops are key to learning through action, but if you don’t know what impact you achieved, it’s hard to assess whether your action was effective and what you might need to change. Therefore, learning platforms should provide a systematic way to measure and track performance, so participants can explicitly see the impact they are achieving.
Learning platforms could further enhance learning by framing and staging challenges for participants when they join. A precedent for this comes from online game designers, who are careful to stage challenges in a way that draws in players and motivates them to seek higher and higher levels of performance. As soon as a player successfully meets a challenge, another challenge invites them to rise to another level. In many gaming platforms, most players can meet the early challenges without help from others, but as the challenges progress, the incentive to collaborate increases. On learning platforms, the early challenges should follow a similar pattern. They should be neither so easy they seem trivial nor so difficult they discourage participants.
Another delicate balance involves the degree to which the platform structures participation. The platform should be neither too open ended nor too prescriptive. A structure that focuses participants on the opportunities and challenges that really matter can be helpful. However, the platform must also leave space in which participants can come up with new approaches themselves. Some of the most powerful learning occurs when we see something that no one else had thought of. Such an insight can lead to a totally different set of approaches, perhaps with far more impact.
Of course, diversity of thought also can lead to conflict, so platform organizers and the groups that form on the platform need to evolve governance structures. These should be explicit about what is permissible and what would be grounds for exclusion from the platform, leaving as much room as possible for divergent approaches. The balance is necessary, because as I’ve mentioned before, productive friction can accelerate learning and performance improvement. Learning platforms need to foster environments that encourage participants to challenge each other in a spirit of mutual respect, believing that everyone’s contribution is potentially important.
Many, if not all, of these features are already embedded in environments I have discussed in earlier chapters—successful movements, extreme sports, and online war games. With the exception of online war games, however, we have yet to see all these features fully developed online. While I have nothing against war games (I was, after all, an executive at Atari), I am eager to see more learning platforms that can help us achieve real-world impact. An opportunity-based narrative may be inspiring, and the passion of the explorer may be highly motivating, but both will do far more to help us achieve our potential if they are supported by scalable learning platforms that can bring together people from all over the world.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXISTING PLATFORMS
While there is a big opportunity for a new generation of platforms that can address this unmet need, existing platforms have potential to evolve in ways that help participants learn faster if platform developers add the necessary features. If existing platforms don’t evolve in such ways, most will be overtaken by the inevitable new entrants.
To begin, platform developers must cultivate a richer understanding of the ecosystems they were designed to support. Their participants’ needs are evolving, and platforms must anticipate the new needs and meet them head-on. None of the features of an ideal learning platform are beyond the reach of existing platforms.
For example, many platforms already include a reputation profile, which can help participants assess each other’s credibility. A participant’s reputation profile might include testimonials from those who have interacted with the participant, identifying the value they received from the interaction. This is a key to building more trust, which is essential for collaborative learning and performance improvement.
Also, many platforms today host discussion forums, which could develop into shared workspaces. Effective discussion moderators can provoke more fruitful dialogues by drawing in more participants and helping to keep the conversation focused on the topics at hand while preserving the ability to fork a discussion into adjacent topics or subtopics. This is one of the most badly needed skill sets in online discussion forums; it can make the difference between a meandering conversation and a real learning experience. (I wrote about it extensively in my book Net Gain more than twenty years ago, but it’s still a major gap.) Online discussions would add even more value if the platform more effectively archives them and makes them searchable, so later participants can benefit from them.
Going a step beyond moderation, platforms could provide coaching. Learning is not just about conversation. Platform providers could train coaches to help emerging impact groups identify actions they might take, monitor their effectiveness, and help them reflect on how they might achieve even greater impact in the future.
Another feature that many existing platforms could add or refine is the opportunity to define and implement performance feedback loops. Inviting participants to identify the performance that matters to them and helping them measure their performance could significantly help the learning process.
AN EARLY PLATFORM FOR LEARNING
Many years ago, enterprise software developer SAP created an online forum for application developers responsible for writing applications to access and leverage SAP programs. Since then, it has evolved remarkably in support of learning.
SAP invited application developers who’d run into problems when writing code to post questions and see if anyone else had encountered a similar problem and could suggest how to address it. Participation didn’t require a lot of effort. The user simply had to frame and post the problem, and no one was expected to spend hours figuring out solutions. The hope was that if someone happened to have already found one, they would share it.
This proved to be such an attractive environment for application developers that over two million of them participated in the forum. As a result, when a developer posted a problem, a satisfactory solution was often posted in a matter of minutes. The productivity of SAP’s application developers significantly improved.
One feature that made participation more attractive to the developers was a reputation profile, which awarded points for offering workable solutions. The more solutions participants offered, the more points they received. The reputation profile also recorded the expertise demonstrated when a solution was provided so that users had objective benchmarks to assess each other’s credibility. That catalyzed something unexpected. Participants built reputation profiles in certain domains, and then other participants began to seek them out. In other words, the interactions expanded beyond problems to solve. These participants wanted to exchange ideas with people sharing their expertise and interests. The forums evolved into a much richer set of discussions that were sustained over time and helped the developers learn from each other.
Something else started to happen, too. Application developers who shared the same interests and ideas began to collaborate in developing entirely new applications. As SAP observed this, it began to provide shared virtual workspaces in which these new development teams could come together. Interestingly, the team members were often geographically distant from one another. If not for the SAP platform, they might never have found each other. As these collaborative efforts began to unfold, an entirely new level of learning was unleashed: now the developers were learning together through action, rather than just conversation.
A PRACTICAL STARTING POINT: MINIMUM VIABLE PLATFORMS
The SAP example underscores an important point that is often missed by platform developers and will be particularly important as platforms evolve. The single biggest cause of failure in platform initiatives is to try to do too much too soon. When technologists design these platforms, they fall prey to the temptation to include in the initial release all the bells and whistles they can imagine will be needed. The problem is that the people designing the product are often not very good at anticipating what the participants’ real needs will be. In fact, such a platform’s complexity can scare away potential users who are not yet convinced of the platform’s value.
A far better approach is to start with the concept of a minimum viable platform. That concept asks, “What is the narrowest group of participants who can be targeted at the outset, and what is their most pressing need?” Then you focus on getting a platform deployed that addresses it. Next, you work on getting a critical mass of participants to experience that need being met, so word of the platform’s value will start to spread. (Everyone talks about the network effects of platforms, often forgetting that those network effects don’t kick in until a critical mass of participants has joined. Until then, platforms have the “empty bar” problem: people enter but can’t find what they were looking for, so they leave, never to return.)
When a critical mass does begin to assemble, you watch how the participants use the platform. What features and functions don’t they use? Consider getting rid of those. What are participants looking for and not finding? Add new features to the platform to address those unmet needs, as SAP did.
My favorite example of the power of staging—which wasn’t an intentional staging effort—comes from Facebook’s early days. Remember, it started as a platform for the students of one school, Harvard University. Out of all the possible reasons why students would want to connect with each other, Facebook’s early success was in helping students connect based on attractiveness ratings. That enabled it to reach critical mass quickly. Only then did it expand its reach to students at other Ivy League universities, then at all universities, then at high schools as well as colleges, and eventually to anyone 13 and older.
THE CHALLENGE OF LEARNING PLATFORMS
Developing and evolving learning platforms will involve some significant challenges. One arises because success breeds complacency. Some of the most successful businesses today are platform businesses, but the existing platforms are firmly wedded to the model of either an aggregation platform or a social platform, and they show little inclination to address this untapped need. They are also heavily dependent on an advertising or commission-based business model that tends to favor the interests of certain participants over others. This undermines the trust that is a key building block for learning, but moving away from that business model could prove very challenging.
A broader challenge is one that confronts most of our institutions today. Virtually all of them are firmly wedded to the scalable-efficiency institutional model. That model is deeply suspicious of platforms in general and tends to underestimate the learning imperative. That is because scalable efficiency is ultimately a command-and-control model: the most reliable way to get efficiency at scale is to tightly control all the people and resources required to deliver value. To the extent that this model acknowledges a need for learning, the tendency is to want to bring the necessary expertise and capability in-house. That’s also one of the reasons that we are seeing a growth in M&A activity globally and a widespread trend toward reducing the number of participants in supply chains and distribution channels. The fewer participants outside our organization that we have to depend on, the more assured we can be of getting the results we need, especially when we are focused on cutting costs rather than increasing the value we deliver to our customers and other stakeholders.
Platforms, however, make us more and more dependent on others for the resources we need, so they are perceived as undermining control. When institutions couple the perceived loss of control with a lack of appreciation for the ability and need to learn faster by collaborating with others who have different skill sets and perspectives, learning platforms seem risky and impractical.
The prevailing mindset and culture will need to shift dramatically before our institutions can reap the benefits of learning platforms. The catalyst for making that shift may have to be us, acting as individuals. We too are experiencing performance pressure and similarly want to tighten control over our surroundings. Wherever possible, we want to become self-sufficient and less reliant on others.
But that could change as the passion of the explorer helps us turn pressure into opportunity. As we begin to see what others who already have this passion are accomplishing and how motivated they are to achieve even more, more and more of us will search for and find that passion within ourselves. The connecting disposition of this passion will motivate us to overcome our fear and seek out others who share our passion, so we can work together. Our openness to collaboration will increase still further if we are fortunate enough to encounter an opportunity-based narrative that shifts our focus from risk to reward and increases our awareness of others who are seeking to make that opportunity a reality. As we become more aware of the opportunities to learn faster and achieve more, we may well seek out platforms that can help us do that, whether or not our institutions encourage us.
We can change our institutions too, when we join a critical mass of others within them who share our felt need for change. If we can find one or two senior leaders with the courage and conviction to support our efforts, we have a good opportunity to drive transformation of the institution by scaling the edge.
Still another path could help drive institutional change. That would be the emergence of more inspiring institutional narratives. As some institutions respond to the mounting pressure by mobilizing others around a shared opportunity, their success may help overcome some of the scalable-efficiency model’s natural resistance to platforms. But again, for this to succeed, it will have to come from scaling an edge, rather than from top-down, big-bang efforts to transform the core.
The good news is that edges of large existing institutions can scale much more rapidly and with far less resources than would have been conceivable a few decades ago, thanks to the existing platform technology. All it takes is the commitment of one or two senior leaders and a few passionate people who can form the edge leadership team and take the risks required to move to a very different institutional model.
Platforms not only can provide a vehicle for scaling edges, but they also can become the foundation of the edge themselves. One of the biggest opportunities to become a large and profitable business in the decades ahead will be to design and deploy learning platforms that can help more of us learn faster together. While this is certainly not the only opportunity to address, it is worth seriously considering.
MY QUEST
As noted earlier, I’ve evolved my personal narrative into a call to action to others to join me on the edge, where we can collaborate in designing and deploying platforms that will help us all to achieve more of our potential. That narrative evolved as I discovered the common underlying theme of the various passions that have shaped my life. While I have been involved in the development and deployment of many kinds of platforms over the years, learning platforms are the big opportunity that excites me the most. This opportunity motivated this book, and it has motivated me to work on creating a new organization that will explicitly seek to deploy a learning platform to help more and more of us come together to achieve much more of our potential.
This new learning platform will be designed to support people as they make the journey beyond fear. It will offer workshops where participants can come together to learn how to find and cultivate their passion of the explorer and evolve their personal narrative to achieve more meaningful impact. A key goal will be to help sustain and deepen the personal connections they establish within the workshops, so they can continue to learn from each other, long after the workshops are over.
The learning platform will also encourage people to form impact groups. The participants may come from the workshops or be recruited by members via professional or other networks. The platform will provide shared workspaces where these impact groups can develop and launch initiatives that will allow them to learn through action and then reflect on the impact they achieved, so they can refine those actions to have even more impact in the future. Coaches will guide the members of these impact groups as they act and learn together.
As more and more impact groups emerge around specific domains like alternative energy technology, manufacturing operations, or woodworking, the learning platform will help them connect into broader and broader networks focused on these domains. Over time, another set of impact groups will emerge with a focus on driving fundamental change in institutions and geographies, like a specific large corporation or a city. As they come together, they will form movements, united by a shared view of the opportunity to create environments that will help more people achieve more of their potential. The learning platform will help these movements coalesce and scale.
At every level, the learning platform will be designed to encourage people to learn by acting together, reflecting on the impact of their action, and evolving their actions to achieve even more impact. Coaching services will be provided to all impact groups to help participants achieve even more impact together. Forums will be offered where people can share stories about impact achieved and seek advice or help from others beyond their own impact group. This will be an ambitious effort. At its core, the learning platform will be designed to achieve two basic objectives: first, to help participants on their personal journeys beyond fear, and second, to motivate them to come together to drive change. Since personal growth and environmental change both depend on moving people to act and learn, I call the platform an “activation center.”
BOTTOM LINE
If we’re going to harness the full potential of opportunity-based narratives and the passion of the explorer, we need the third pillar of positive emotion—platforms, specifically learning platforms. When we can bring all three pillars together, the opportunities will be endless. There are significant challenges, but imagine what we could accomplish with platforms that help us all to learn faster—exponentially faster.
Here are some questions to consider regarding learning platforms:
• To what extent are the platforms you use helping you learn faster?
• On these platforms, are you connecting with people who are motivated to learn faster?
• How might you use those platforms differently to learn even faster?
• Do you see any untapped opportunities to develop learning platforms that support opportunity-based narratives and/or passionate explorers in particular domains?