CHAPTER 1

Reach Out and Connect

PEDIATRICIAN TRACI WOLBRINK, MD, MPH, was in Malawi working with a patient when she realized the approaches she uses at Boston Children’s Hospital weren’t available, and the practices at the remote hospital she was in weren’t working. Having recently been in Cambodia, where she saw a local doctor use a noninvasive ventilation strategy (bubble CPAP) for a child with breathing difficulties, she wanted to try that same approach. She searched the hospital for component pieces that had been discarded from other equipment and created her own bubble CPAP that saved the little girl’s life.

When Wolbrink returned to Boston, where she works in critical care, she talked with colleagues about the experience and shared this simple and effective approach with them. She wondered, what if it wasn’t necessary to travel the globe to connect knowledge. What if there was another way? She recalled an African proverb that had always resonated with her: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Wolbrink and Dr. Jeffrey Burns, chief of Critical Care Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, were working on an initiative to do just that: bring innovative practices out of local toolboxes and into the hands of people searching for solutions. They had begun the project when Burns received a phone call from a pediatrician over 2,300 miles away in Guatemala. His colleague needed advice while caring for a girl with a serious infection.

Burns knew well the cutting edge tools in medicine. When he watched how his son was able to easily connect, build skills, and play seamlessly with others through his Xbox, he wondered why that same level of progress didn’t exist in collaboration or learning for medicine. There were too many technical challenges with sharing and exchanging knowledge across the miles.

Wolbrink and Burns created what became OPENPediatrics, a global social learning platform focused on saving lives. Every year close to 7 million children die after being stricken with diseases that are mostly treatable. The challenge is not that more research is needed for new treatments, or even access to drugs and hardware. Instead, it’s getting the information needed to treat those diseases in the right hands before it’s too late. It was time for sharing medical knowledge at scale. 

While watching the Masters Golf Tournament one April, Burns was impressed by the power of digital instruction he’d witnessed on the event’s website—where players were coached through weaknesses to find a stronger, more consistent swing, or to deal with specific issues, such as putting or chipping. He aimed to find similar technology for clinicians to receive coaching to improve their practice. Not just video or games, though.

Why not use the power of the Internet to distribute information across the globe with collaborative and social tools? Then clinicians anywhere could be coached through their medical paces, learning from anyone with expertise. Why not use modern capabilities to take a giant leap forward by helping people help their fellow human beings?

OPENPediatrics, founded in 2008, is a free social learning platform for doctors, nurses, and other specialists focused on pediatrics. Over 4,000 clinicians used this private space during its first year, says Steve Carson, director of operations, who joined the team after directing communications for MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. These clinicians come together around the clock to learn, share, and ultimately improve the lives of children across the globe.

At the core of the system is a library of videos, animations, illustrations, and articles produced by the OPENPediatrics team and medical personnel on the ground who have found a better way to do things than the ways they were taught in medical school.¹

In the online community, clinicians can structure what they need to learn and share what they’re learning each day, unencumbered by space, time, or political boundaries. Over the years, content has grown into a catalyst for conversation. As you watch a video, you can comment or even ask questions of others viewing it. A team of experts is assigned to each video and when questions are posed, they can both answer and create ancillary content to share or to use for updating materials.

Sharing something has more value than anything unshared.
–Chris Crummey

This is where it gets really exciting. As clinicians become comfortable with the approach, they begin to post their own checklists, protocols, diagrams, and write-ups that can also be shared across the globe. In addition to starting and joining groups around topics of interest, they can receive notification when new content or conversations are forming around topics that matter to them. Through the interaction that follows these connections, they learn from others who are also interested in those topics.

Wolbrink points out that all of the benefits couldn’t be known at the outset. For instance, she didn’t expect OPENPediatrics would be widely used in Israel, Libya, Iran, and other parts of the Middle East, places where, as it turns out, despite vast cultural disagreements and long-standing animosities, childhood health takes precedence. “The platform has really been able to break down barriers that we never even thought could be broken,” adds Burns. “The problem in the medical field is not ready access to information,” he adds. “It’s how do we manage our knowledge in an era of data overload?”

Clay Shirky, who teaches new media at New York University and is the author of Cognitive Surplus,² has written about this very disconnect. “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure,” he says.

Rather than use cumbersome traditional routes to publish, OPENPediatrics makes it possible for doctors to rapidly share information every time there is a new type of medical emergency afflicting a child. Solving this problem across the miles has long been difficult because it hasn’t been possible to “load the boat,” a phrase used at teaching hospitals to remind medical students they weren’t alone. If you had a problem, if you needed help, if you needed to learn something new, there were always people in your immediate area you could call on at any time. OPENPediatrics now makes it possible to load the boat across vast distances.

With OPENPediatrics, Burns says, “our goal was to create a community of practice where, instead of learning together being broad and thin like a MOOC, we would be narrow and much more deep.”

OPENPediatrics provides structure to a vast network that has existed for centuries: the medical community of clinicians caring specifically for children. Although online social networks and online communities feel new, they codify and extend a practice used by people through the ages.

Go far, go together. Instantly recall what you know and immediately put it to work. Learn as you do. Engage instead of escape. Thrive instead of survive. This is social learning at its best. Colleagues turned into collaborators. A modern and brilliant way to work.

The Workplace Has Changed

At this moment, your people are already learning through social media. They’re reaching out and connecting in powerful ways. The question is, can you recognize, appreciate, and take advantage of the power inherent in this new level of communication? Do you want to facilitate or debilitate? Do you want to play a part in what and how people learn? Or do you want to try to stop them? Will you restrict them? Or will you free them to do the work they were hired to do—and will you do it with them?

Between one-third and two-thirds of your employees are meeting their needs by working around you.
—Bill Jensen

The 20th century was about leading with technology and tools. The 21st century is about leading into a connected world.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and their inside-the-enterprise counterparts have enabled an unprecedented number of truly amazing conversations, many of which have led to greater awareness, new businesses, and social change.

We are seeing a new kind of hero who wants to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. The new model for capitalism in the world of startups is, “Be helpful. Do something great. Serve.”

Gamification is at work in the modern day. The Longitude Prize,³ the X-Prize Foundation, and the TED Prize offer huge cash infusions to anyone who can solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. Our altruism is no longer reserved for after work. It is moving into its proper place, center stage, in boardrooms around the world.

There is an unprecedented desire in people, particularly in younger generations, to make a difference, to make one’s life worth something. There is a need to do work that matters.

That need is the tinder of a fire that is now being sparked by the emerging tools and holistic ideals of social learning. Working socially is no longer about just saying “hi.” It’s now about using modern tools to coalesce into self-organizing groups that are ready and waiting for the call to make things right.

Working socially is not just about rallying around an idea. Social learning is about getting on the same page in a constructivist approach, where every voice is heard and everyone contributes to the solution, where buy-in is endemic to its creation. It’s about co-creating the world we want to see, a world we need to see.

Our challenge, at every level of the organization, is no longer just how to beat the competition. We now also have to look at issues of sustainability and restoration from a global perspective. We need to attend to planetary survival as well as the vitality of entire industries and financial markets. We need to accept that learning is produced by society, by us, and that we each play a role in that production. 

Social learning resonates with all of us who realize that we can no longer act alone and hope to come up with grand solutions that will work seamlessly across all sectors, across all generations, and across all innovations.

Our world has simultaneously become too complex and too small to do that. We need to come together.

People want to learn fast, as they move through their multidimensional jobs, not just on the rare occasion they attend a class. Senior leaders need to provide their people with vibrant, effective, and cutting-edge tools to support their nonstop learning, which will ensure they can adapt to market forces at the speed of change. Social tools are changing the way people work, often bypassing formal training altogether.

Fundamentally, this book is about how people learn socially, often (but not always) with technology—and how they can do more, learn more, and be more as a result. This book is not a plea to reorganize or dismantle the training department. It’s not a pitch to turn off your email, at least not unless or until your company is ready. No one will suggest you move all your work to mobile devices or change your organization’s priorities.

Online social tools provide learners with connections across boundaries and over time.
—Baiyun Chen and Thomas Bryer

What this book will show is that learning’s value can be recognized across departments and locations, with employees, partners, customers, and suppliers, when social media seamlessly connects people and ideas every day. When people work together, they learn together, in the flow of work.

We won’t focus on the tools here. They change fast. We ask you to visit the accompanying website for this book at www.thenewsociallearning.com for details about technologies and where to learn more. There you can also contribute to the conversation and locate fresh information.

Use this book to discover how to extend and expand your interactions with colleagues, and how to use social tools to create something new, powerful, and vibrant—something that could change the organization, and the world.

Amazing things are happening with collaborations that only a few years ago would have been impossible. In this book we make suggestions for how you can become a part of them.

Social learning can facilitate a culture where we get better at getting better. Our work is no longer just about competing. It’s now about being stronger contributors and savvier learners, with leaders co-creating the future.

We walk a fine line in this book between being concerned for the future and expressing our excitement about the radical changes in our midst. We provide countless action steps you can take. But it is never our intention to overwhelm. The great thing about the new social learning is that you can start small. There is no need for mass adoption, for total buy-in, or for group consensus.

Social learning is a fundamental shift in how people work—leveraging how we have always worked, now with new, more humanizing tools, accelerating individual and collective reach, giving us the resources to create the organization, and the world, we want to live in.

What Is the New Social Learning?

The new social learning is not just the technology of social media, although it makes use of it. It is not merely the ability to express ourselves in a group of opt-in friends. The new social learning combines social media tools with a shift in organizational culture, a shift that encourages ongoing knowledge transfer and connects people in ways that make learning enjoyable.

“Social learning thrives in a culture of service and wonder. It is inspired by leaders, enabled by technology, and ignited by opportunities that have only recently unfolded.”⁴ Social learning is the natural complement to social business, connecting people to people, information, and insights within an organization.

Social learning can be defined as joining with others to make sense of and create new ideas. It has been around for a long time and naturally occurs in groups at conferences and among old friends in a café as easily as it does among students online in a distance-learning program who have never met in person.

We experience social learning when we go down the hall to ask a question of a colleague and when we post that same question on Twitter anticipating someone will respond. It can be self-organizing or orchestrated by facilitators interested in encouraging others to learn.⁵

Social learning is augmented with social media tools that bridge distance and time, enabling people to easily interact across workplace, passion, curiosity, skill, or need. Most often social learning is intrinsically motivated and happens as naturally as breathing. It benefits from a diversity in types of intelligence and in the experiences of those learning.

Social learning is accelerated when we give our attention to individuals, groups, and projects that interest and energize us. We self-select the themes we want to follow and filter out those that feel burdensome, all with impunity. No one gets offended when we don’t follow a project outside our domain. No one notices when we temporarily filter out the rants of people beating their own drum.

It’s because we have independent thought and inevitably spend some time alone that we benefit from the creative abrasion of groups, and it’s in pairs and teams in which we can harmonize our insights with others. Both sides of the African proverb are true and important. If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. The new social learning assists us with both.

A willingness to keep stretching and moving beyond our comfort zones determine success in this network era.
—Sahana Chattopadhyay

Social media is a set of technologies used to engage two, three, or more people; social business is connecting people to people, information, and insights within an organization; and social learning is working with others to make sense of new ideas. What’s new is how powerfully they work together. Social tools leave a digital audit trail, documenting our journey—often an unfolding story—and provide a path for others to learn from.

Tools are now available to facilitate social learning that is unconstrained by geographic differences (spatial boundaries) or time-zone differences (temporal boundaries) among team members.

The new social learning reframes social media from a mere marketing strategy to an approach that encourages and facilitates knowledge capture, transfer, and use, connecting people in a way consistent with how we naturally interact. It is not a delivery system analogous to classroom training, e-learning, or even mobile learning. Instead, it’s a powerful approach to sharing and discovering a whole array of options—some of which we may not even know we need—leading to more informed decision making and an intimate, expansive, and dynamic understanding of the culture and context in which we work. “When working in the open, building distinction, and uncovering expertise, social learning makes knowledge relevant and actionable, building the kind of trust, transparency, and agility needed to deliver social business results,” says Ed Brill, author of Opting-In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager.

In many ways, the new social learning is far bigger and more transformative than any lens we’ve previously used to look at learning in organizations. “It is a socio-political, historical shift that is bigger, broader, and much more fascinating,” writes social business leader and former director at OpenText, Deb Lavoy. “A new perspective is changing how we think about society, politics, interpersonal relationships, science, government, and business. New approaches are emerging. Learning and self-expression are exploding. Values are changing. Leadership is changing. The economy is changing. Change itself is changing—it is accelerating and becoming the norm.”⁶

The new social learning provides people at every level, in every nook of the organization, and every corner of the globe, a way to reclaim their natural capacity to learn nonstop. Social learning can help pilots fly more safely, salespeople be more genuinely persuasive, and doctors keep up to date on current techniques in their fields.

For a long time, many of us have known learning could transform the workplace. We longed for tools to catch up with that potential. Only recently have changes in corporate culture and technology allowed this eventuality to unfold.

Clay Shirky points out, “Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.”⁷

Social learning happens when we keep the conversation going by posting a photo on Instagram and tagging it in a way that elicits more comments from our friends, when we write about it on a blog, during coaching sessions with our mentees, or in a casual conversation with the person on the treadmill next to us at the gym.

Social software has been around for almost 50 years, dating back to the Plato bulletin board system. Network communities included CompuServe, AOL, and Usenet. The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), a dial-up discussion board, was launched when the founders of Facebook were toddlers.⁸ Back then, however, it was only technology enthusiasts who used those systems, primarily because their interfaces were difficult to navigate, not terribly intuitive, and didn’t readily surface or share the best ideas.

The new social learning moves services, assets, smarts, and guidance closer to people who are seeking answers, solving problems, overcoming uncertainty, and exploring ways to improve how they work. They facilitate collaboration and inform choices on a wide stage, fostering learning from a vast, intellectually diverse set of people.

These new social tools don’t replace training, knowledge management, and communications practices used today. They augment them. They introduce approaches that fundamentally change getting up to speed, provide a way to share mockups as easily as finely polished documents, and elicit the participation of departments that previously hadn’t considered themselves responsible for employee development at all.

Most of what we learn at work and elsewhere comes from engaging in networks where people co-create, collaborate, and share knowledge, fully participating and actively engaging, driving, and guiding their learning through whatever topics will help them improve.

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

The new social learning allows us, as Stowe Boyd (who first coined the term social tools and continues to observe their influence) puts it, “[to grow] bigger than my head. I want to create an idea space where I can think outside my mind, leveraging my connections with others.”¹⁰

Moving Theory Into Practice

A “social learning theory” was first put forward in 1954, standing on the shoulders of John Dewey and drawing on the budding fields of sociology, behavior modification, and psychology applied to understanding and changing conduct.¹¹ Ideas from social learning theory informed the thinking of later learning theorists, including Albert Bandura, who wrote in 1977, “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling.”¹²

The early focus of social learning theory was learning socially appropriate behavior by imitating others, which is only a small aspect of how social learning is used in practice today. It’s unfortunate what was called social learning had such a limited scope. Recognizing this, there will be times we shorten “the new social learning” to “social learning” here, and in our work elsewhere, to describe the broader issues and opportunities now available. Social learning is modeling, observing, sharing, participating, and so much more.

Social constructivism is the theory of knowledge that seems to best describe how people learn together, whether in person or online. When you engage with people, you build your own insight into what’s being discussed. Someone else’s understanding complements yours, and together you start to weave an informed interpretation. You tinker until you can move on.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget laid the groundwork for this approach by challenging the behaviorist notion, popular in the 1950s, implying that people were passive recipients of external stimuli that shaped how they behaved.¹³ Instead, Piaget conducted many experiments to demonstrate that people are active participants in their learning. They interpret what’s around them based on their unique current understanding of the world, and then they continually modify their understanding as they encounter new information. Piaget’s discoveries eventually led to the concept and practice of discovery learning for children and the use of role-play and simulation for adults. Active participation is the key in both cases. ¹⁴

Learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context.
—Albert Bandura

We are social creatures. If we play an active role in creating our views of reality, then the groups we participate in also contribute. Our reality is shaped by our social interactions. These exchanges provide context—scaffolding “constructed” of what we have already learned, with what other people have learned, and so on. This generates a virtuous spiral, socially generated and built, and more powerful than any one participant could create individually.

Throughout much of human history any sort of organized learning has been hierarchical. Teachers (and trainers, by extension) have arbitrated learning, and have wielded authority over the students they teach. We often accept this approach uncritically, and it follows us into work. Those who are recognized for holding knowledge are perceived as more powerful than other people who may also know a great deal, but who don’t hold that over other people’s heads.

But too much hierarchy undermines our ability to learn socially, and there are much better ways to organize things.

Jon Husband, who writes about and consults on social architecture for organizations, realized the power that connections had to subvert and break down hierarchies. In 1999 he coined the term wirearchy to contrast with hierarchy to describe how the use of the Internet, hyperlinks, and social technology was going to transform the way we work and learn. The “wire” in the name represents the multifaceted and multilevel connections in a true network, evocative of those in a high functioning electronic device, and based on the natural movement of information between network nodes. In these human-centered networks, sharing builds trust and credibility so the relationships themselves generate value.¹⁵

Peter Senge, with The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, introduced a language of change that people within organizations could embrace. It offered a vision of workplaces that were humane and of companies that were built around learning.¹⁶ What organizations learned in the years after working towards embracing that notion was that initiating and sustaining change is more daunting than they’d imagined, and making change happen requires leaders to change the way they think about organizations. Rather than turning to technological metaphors for inspiration, Senge looked to living systems.

“To understand why sustaining significant change is so elusive, we need to think less like managers and more like biologists,”¹⁷ argues Senge.

Dee Hock transformed the credit card industry as the founding CEO of Visa by moving beyond metaphor and structuring the entire enterprise on principles of social learning, evolving systems, and democratic governance. “We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born—a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced,” said Hock. The ability of individual banks to chart their own courses was protected. Innovation was cherished. Decision making on joint activities was kept as local as possible, among those most affected, so that only the matters affecting everyone were handled centrally. No one knew all that was going on and no one had to. Everyone knew their own parts of the system, what they connected to, and the agreements that held the larger whole together. The system could learn and adapt as fast as any of its parts, large or small, could figure out something better or more valuable to do.

Move from command and control to encourage and engage.
—Jane Hart

Hierarchy won’t disappear completely in organizations. Instead, we are seeing an expansion of options and a shift in priorities. As Husband notes, “Business structures founded on command and control, automation, and process are giving way to structures that are less hierarchical and more dynamic, designed to engage people’s hearts and minds to make a difference in the world.” They can arrive none too soon.

We long for the day when organizing is based on principles, trust, and agreements, rather than on rules, coercion, and authority.

“The person-to-person trust that arises from feeling a connection with people is essential to rapid learning and value creation in a world flooded with communication options,” says Joel Getzendanner, the initial director of impact investing at the F.B. Heron Foundation and long-time advisor to social-purpose enterprises. “Any organization that does not actively enhance community—both internally and externally—will be at a severe competitive disadvantage.

“No one is immune from the question of the day, ‘How fast can we learn to…’ with the operative words being ‘fast,’ learn’ and most importantly ‘we’,”¹⁸ adds Getzendanner. The new social learning leverages quick updates, broad networks, content, media, and mobile devices to introduce people to ideas in quick bursts, when and where it suits their workflow—no matter their position in the organization or the perceived power they have from the org chart. Its methods are designed to be compelling and fun, with virtually no learning curve. They support learning in a way that more closely mirrors how groups of people interact in person.

Social constructivism has become timely because for so long work has focused on what’s known. To succeed today, we must understand new information and complex concepts—that which hasn’t been known before and is often more complicated than one person can figure out alone.

The 21st-century mind is a collective mind where we access what we know in our friends’ and colleagues’ brains.

“To understand why sustaining significant change is so elusive, we need to think less like managers and more like biologists.”

—Peter Senge

Rotterdam School of Management’s Karen Stephenson points out, because “We cannot experience everything; other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. I store my knowledge in my friends.”¹⁹

Together we are smarter. We can address ever more challenging and complex problems. What we store in our heads is not as important as the totality of what we can access through our networks and the breadth of the world we connect into. Together we can go further.

Four Changes That Shift Work

The convergence of four key trends has accelerated change in the workplace and now presents the opportunity for social learning. Although some of these trends have been observable for decades, their influence has grown with time.

    1. Accelerated pace of change requires agility.

    2. Technology goes where we go without boundaries.

    3. Shifting workplace demographics change expectations.

    4. People desire personal connection.

These four shifts remind us that the boundary of an organization is no longer meaningful when it comes to what learning is important (to that organization) or where information and experience are available. You don’t know what you need until you need it; and it’s as likely to come from external sources as those inside. Learning networks need to be both within and across organizations.

The content that needs knowing is potentially universal. Just understanding your industry, country, or company is not enough. Both competitors and partners can arise from anywhere. Business networks must be global and multi-sector, so learning networks must be global and multi-sector.

Learning needs to be continuous and adaptive because the world provides a continuous stream of new challenges. The only learning approach fast and adaptive enough for the new environment is interpersonal, and it uses the tools that in many ways gave rise to the required pace and range of learning we are now faced with.

Learning is a social experience for adventurers.
—Diethild

Accelerated Pace of Change Requires Agility

We take for granted that change is a constant of modern life, and it’s getting faster all the time. Then two weeks go by and we realize we missed a whole big thing. Just because we know change is happening, doesn’t make it any easier to cope with. Keeping up is hard.

Long gone are the days when you bought the same brands and stuck with them, when you knew what to expect from business, from government, from the economy, from your life. Everything is moving faster, in large part because of the Internet. Companies like Eastman Kodak, which were once titans of industry, have fallen because they couldn’t change fast enough.

New companies are popping up all over, at a lower cost of entry than ever before, empowered by global reach. Existing companies are expanding into new markets. Your customers have more choices and more incentives than ever to shift. Outsourcing those nagging parts of your business, like accounting, fulfillment, public relations, and even parts of human resources, has become commonplace, reducing the time it takes to bring new product and ideas to market. Crowdfunding sites have even transformed the way people generate quick cash to work on what’s new.

“We cannot experience everything; other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. I store my knowledge in my friends.”

—Karen Stephenson

It’s not just the availability of new technologies, but rather a whole new mindset. It’s called lean, and it has a partner called agile.

Lean and agile are the latest concepts in being nimble. They started with “lean manufacturing” and then “lean programs,” “lean startups,” and “lean learning.”

The idea is to look at how people operate and interact together as a system. From this perspective, the people we create for become part of how we design and iterate. Working in tandem, people never work too long on what they’re creating before getting feedback—and changing direction if they’ve missed the mark.²⁰

Salima Nathoo, who coined the term lean learning in 2010, says, “A lean approach allows us to perfect the art of being human in the age of everything.” When we see learning as the energy that passes between us, it’s clear our approaches to learning must be fast, nimble, and relevant. “Learning today,” Nathoo says, “ignites at the confluence of limited time and excess consumption. In a world that seeks to predictively analyze what’s good for our wellbeing, lean learning places the power and luxury of choice back into our hands.”²¹

Rather than months or years in isolation to develop something new, with agile approaches, the developer creates a mock-up in days or weeks to show to the client. That “minimal viable product” (MVP) is the barest functional version of the final product, and may have only one feature. Every step along the way, the client is helping to craft the right product. Almost immediately, each new feature is seen as it gets rolled out. Because each part of the new product is tested and retested before going into production, the new systems and ways of working don’t break the larger system.

The concepts of lean and agile are now being used to design and deploy internal culture changes, courses, and even consulting engagements.

People value iteration, the ability to create something quickly, from scratch, and learn about the demand for it before investing much time. You can see if there’s interest in buying before you invest too much time.

“A lean approach allows us to perfect the art of being human in the age of everything.”

—Salima Nathoo

If other companies are bringing new products and services to market faster than you can do your initial research, you will be left behind. If younger employees ask technical questions of their network on social media, getting answers faster than you can look them up, you will be left behind. And if other organizations learn how to do “lean learning” and yours does not, then yours will be left behind. It’s happening. The world is getting more agile. Will you be?

Technology Goes Where We Go, Without Boundaries

In the past, the best technology was found at work. That’s no longer the case. Now it’s in our pockets and purses. It’s with some of us 24 hours a day. The line between personal time and work, for many of us, begins to blur, requiring new boundaries, limits, and discussions of what makes for reasonable expectations.

In the past, it was rare to be published, for instance. These days, it’s the norm. Your words or pictures can show up on a website only minutes after the impulse strikes. This is the age of “living out loud.” We live in a time when it seems everyone has something to say and where feedback is almost compulsive, at least among young generations. Whether your product sucks or rocks, the review gets posted. If you inhibit people’s natural impulse to share what they notice about your company, you come across as disinterested, dismissive, and out of touch. And it doesn’t matter if they work for you. You become irrelevant, as more and more companies roll out social media programs to capture and embrace such involvement.

Social media is a tool; social learning is an action.
—Dan Pontefract

Another workplace shift is that everyone’s growing technologically savvy. Easy-to-use portable devices and rich media on the Internet, on TV, and in stores have changed our expectations about communication inside our companies, too. We bring our knowledge and assumptions from the marketplace to work. As a result, we are no longer willing to put up with hard-to-manage interfaces, poor-quality events, or questionably useful designs. We now know, and have experienced, better alternatives.

Furthermore, the proliferation of devices means formerly restrictive IT departments are becoming more open to bring your own device (BYOD) policies and providing employees more variety in the tools they procure. Add to that, wearable technology that can interact with personal behaviors at a level never seen before, and technology can help us become more mindful, more capable,²² and reflective because it makes us more attentive to our movements.²³ The Internet-of-things—where devices are beginning to communicate and assist one another in performing the functions they’re designed for—will automate out of our daily mundane tasks, giving us back time to focus on other things.

Workplace Demographics Change Expectations

Think back to the year you joined the workforce. Then reflect on how things were about six months into that job. Did you think you should be given the opportunity to make big splashes and reap rich rewards? Did you consider off hours your own, reserved to pursue your passions? Many of us did. Yet we somehow forget our experiences when we label newcomers to the workforce as unrealistic about advancement or uninterested in working hard.

Some of the qualities associated with the youngest generations in the workforce today are qualities of age, not generation. Brashness, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and constant questioning are characteristics many of us had when we were young. Because we didn’t have Facebook connections with friends reinforcing our perspectives, let alone magazines and blogs showcasing young people who became chief executive officers at 19, we abandoned those mindsets to fit in.

Have your expectations of the workplace changed in this newly connected world? Are many things the same as they were as recently as last year? If you were to go to work for your company now, would you not have higher expectations than you had in the past? We certainly would.

Our wide look at demographic shifts has convinced us that organizations of all types and sizes have a lot to learn and do differently if they are to attract and keep the talent—of all ages, genders, and cultures—they need to succeed. It’s not all about Millennials—or very soon, Generation Z. Many of us find that social technologies allow us to work in ways we never believed would happen in our lifetimes.

CEOs and industry leaders of all ages are beginning to use status updates to open dialogues within their organizations, throughout enterprises, and with potential customers. By responding to a few words and a question mark, people provide expert testimony, gut-level hunches, and a field view that organizations might never capture otherwise.

Are senior leaders telling their followers what they had for lunch? Probably not. Are they distributing observations while waiting for a delayed flight? Maybe. Do they believe working in social ways offers business value? Certainly.

Bill Ives, a white-haired artist who used to make his living in the enterprise software industry, points out, “These tools allow me to connect with smart people regardless of age or tech-savvy. They honor my busy schedule and let me focus on my business.” These shifts are about everyone in the workforce. We don’t discount the generational factor; we simply see it as part of the whole.²⁴

Anyone who stops learning, whether at 20 or at 80, is old. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
—Henry Ford

We believe differences in generation, gender, and culture together provide a useful framework to address a changing workforce and workplace. Success will go to those businesses savvy enough to understand, learn from, and leverage these shifts.

We should aspire to create workplaces that use the talents of everyone, connecting them in meaningful ways, regardless of differences in generation, gender, and culture.

Generation

The biggest demographic change in the workplace is generational. Today, more than half the workforce is made up of Millennials, and by 2030, they’ll make up more than 75 percent of the global workforce.²⁵ Overall, this generation has a high comfort level with technology and broad expectations about using it to learn. The previous generation, Generation X, shares many of these expectations but has learned to navigate slow-to-change workplaces.²⁶ Millennials and generations after are not as apt to put up with inefficient ways. Seventy-one percent of 16- to 24-year-olds use online media when they encounter a problem with a product, rather than reaching for a phone.²⁷

Baby Boomers, all now over 50, are retiring.²⁸ Although the perception exists that they do not widely embrace technology, a 2010 survey by ATD (formerly ASTD) shows that 79 percent of Baby Boomers, compared with 76 percent of Millennials, believe social media tools are not being used enough for education activities within organizations.²⁹

The swift exit of the Baby Boomers, dubbed the “Silver Tsunami,” has far reaching implications on the workplace, leaving skills shortages in its path. Organizations like California utility company PG&E, who realize half of their workforce could retire in the next five years, have begun creating programs specifically targeted at upskilling potential employees to meet the growing demand for skills once more available in the labor pool.³⁰

As the cost of college keeps going up, many Millennials are passing up college and the debts that come with it. Instead, they are trying to find new ways into the workforce. Companies, especially with skill gaps and who can teach their new employees the key skills needed for the job, are welcoming these young people with open arms. It’s unlikely those companies, which have had mostly older workers in the past, are prepared for the social and learning expectations of their new employees.

Some are revitalizing apprentice programs, certifications, and mentoring networks, made popular before college gained more widespread participation. Companies are also partnering heavily with trade schools and community colleges, bringing specific types of tradecraft into the organization so people can learn on the job. These approaches, too, take on a new flavor when paired with the connected and social sensibilities of younger workers. Maddie Grant, co-author of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World and When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business, describes the hallmarks of a Millennial-friendly organization as “digital, clear, fluid, and fast.”³¹

However, interesting differences regarding social network use were revealed in a multigenerational study of more than 1,700 employees from organizations across 12 countries and six industries by IBM’s Institute of Business Value. According to the study, more than 50 percent of Millennials access their personal social networks for professional reasons less frequently than Gen X employees, who use social networks more frequently (greater than 60 percent) to communicate with colleagues, get industry information, and promote their companies’ products and services.³²

Further, “Millennials have been instilled with egalitarian and participatory values by their parents since birth.”³³ These civicminded, tech-savvy Millennials, accustomed to close networks of peers, also have high expectations that employers will give them frequent feedback, enable workplace collaboration, and provide healthy work-life balance. They want to work at companies in step with their broadminded values. “Millennials favor a corporate culture of inclusion and tolerance and will gravitate toward companies that actively promote racial and cultural diversity,” says Ron Alsop, author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace.

Surround yourself with people who light up when they talk about what they’re working on.
—Grace Garey

Fairly soon, Generation Z will begin entering the workforce. They are even more intimate with technology and have higher expectations for instant answers and constant connectivity than Millennials. With them will come the ability to influence world events through sizable communities rather than large pools of capital. They will also create exponential hyperconnectivity among people, computers, machines, and objects. They will take shortcuts through systems to focus on outcomes rather than processes, making meaning and purpose the center of personal and professional experience. If you think the Millennials change everything, they will be eclipsed by the shifts brought into the workplace by Generation Z.³⁴

Gender

To add to the demographic shift, estimates suggest that within this decade nearly 60 percent of the workforce will be female, a group more likely to turn to its social networks for insights and perspectives than males.³⁵ Studies show that women experience a physiological and emotional change when they connect verbally. Combined with new ways to easily maintain, organize, and create new connections, these networks demonstrate value to women more quickly because they feel more like experiences that take place off line.

Perhaps that’s why 76 percent of women online use social networks at least weekly and the rate of social network adoption in the past year has been especially strong among older women.³⁶

The impact of women and economic growth has played out quietly for centuries despite impressive results and may well be the dominant source of economic growth in the near future. Organizations that are able to capitalize on the roles women play in the economy will most likely have a competitive advantage as the world pulls out of the global recession. To this end, where organizations have invested in the development of women, the results have been both profound and dramatic.³⁷

There are implications of shifts in family, too. According the U.S. Census Bureau, married couples currently make up only half of the population and in most couples both adults work.³⁸ This means that unlike in years past, there isn’t someone at home to be there to wait on a cable repair service call, or to pick up a sick child from school. Flexible work schedules and the ability to connect from anywhere grow in importance.

Culture

Race, natural origin, ethnic background, religious differences, and cultural upbringing influences organizational culture too. Culture refers to the values, norms, and traditions that affect the way people typically perceive, think, interact, behave, and make judgments. Culture even affects perceptions of time, which can impact day-to-day scheduling, deadlines, and how long we expect change to take.

Being a country of immigrants, the United States has a very culturally diverse population made up of people from every part of the globe. Workplaces have become multiracial and multicultural. Today, the workplace of most organizations is more culturally diverse than at any time in history because leaders understand diversity provides wider perspectives and greater chances to look at work in new ways.

A culture of learning often produces great achievement but a culture of achievement rarely results in great learning.
—Drew Perkins

“A major cause of many of the conflicts in the world is our intolerance of difference,” says Mary Gordon, author of Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child.³⁹ “Though Americans, especially, like to proclaim independence, our health, creativity, productivity, and humanity emerge from our interdependence, our history of relationships,” add Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, in Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered.⁴⁰

Studies show a focus on cultural competence can improve the ability to interact effectively with people from different cultures; such competence depends on our awareness of our own cultural worldview, knowledge of other cultural practices, tolerant attitudes towards cultural differences, and cross-cultural skills.

Culture also has a big influence on the workplace. People across the world now have access to technology, which can help them connect with new customers or a remote workforce. Out of the world’s estimated 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to mobile phones. Those numbers demonstrate just how ubiquitous these tools have become—only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets.⁴¹

Organizations that are cross-generational, cross-gender, and cross-cultural will be more capable, agile, thorough, and empathetic—understanding, and supporting their community members. They will be stronger and will contribute more to their organizations than either integrated teams or any other group of employees.

Expanding Desire for Personal Connection

Let’s get to the core of our challenge, though. We have always been social creatures. We have been naturally driven to communicate, converse, and have shared with one another since our ancestors came into being. This is part of our survival mechanism, as well as our natural preference, and our ability to converse and share with one another continues to expand.

“A global social conscience is one of the biggest trends to have emerged in the last decade,” says Amilcar Perez, president of telecom/mobile worldwide at Nielsen. “Global consumers are collectively speaking out and demanding that corporate make a positive contribution to society.”⁴²

“During past tough economic times, there was a decrease in volunteering,” says Patrick Corvington, then CEO of the Federal Corporation for National and Community Service, “but today there’s a ‘compassion boom’ of people helping others.”⁴³ That compassion boom echoes around the world. “Despite the [economic] downturn, across the globe people’s sense of commitment to helping others—and to brands and companies that share that commitment—remains strong,” says a series of reports from public-relations firm Edelman.⁴⁴

In an Intelligence Group Cassandra Report, 64 percent of Millennials said it’s a priority for them to make the world a better place.⁴⁵ A global study by Deloitte showed that greater than 47 percent of those under 40 years old worldwide believed that the purpose of business is to improve the world around us.⁴⁶

When people on the farm worked with their neighbors, putting up a barn or exchanging wheat for corn, they shared information about a harvesting technique or a new recipe. They created and sustained social capital—the stock and flow of social trust, norms, and networks, and the reciprocity drawn upon to solve common problems. Social capital became financial capital as two farmers who exchanged tools could do more while buying less.

The opportunities ramped up as transportation enabled us to become more mobile and broadened the number of people we could socialize with around town. Then the phone let our voices do the travelling and negated the requirement for us to be in the same place as those we wanted to talk with. As telephone lines expanded globally, distance became even less of a barrier for conversation and connections. As satellites and cellular and computer networks came online, we became able to communicate with anyone and everyone, anywhere and anytime.

Communication and collaboration reached a tipping point with email and online forums, then instant messaging, then voice over Internet, then video. Just as we thought we couldn’t possibly be any more connected, our social nature fueled another expansion as we formed alliances and human networks of distributed organizations using social media tools. Finally.

These connections represent more than an expanding volume of conversations. We are witnessing a dramatic increase in our collective thinking, collaboration, and capacity to grow. We are seeing a previously unachievable human network effect, where our growing connectivity is enhancing everyone’s ability to know.

Doug Engelbart, the father of personal computing, and inventor of the computer mouse, was prescient when he pondered a collective IQ half a century ago:

We may now be realizing this dream. An opportunity to raise personal, organizational, and collective IQ has arrived. As stressed as our communication capabilities seem today, history shows this trend will continue as we figure out how to more effectively connect, collaborate, converse, and learn. We need to embrace the opportunity for personal connections and be willing to evolve.

As Harlan Cleveland, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and contributor to the Marshall Plan wrote:

Is This Learning?

Often, when we talk about these trends and technologies, people ask us how we define learning. We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that—when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced—changes what we know and builds on what we do. It’s based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us.

Learning is what makes us more vibrant participants in a world seeking fresh perspectives, novel insights, and firsthand experiences. When shared, what we have learned mixes with what others have learned, then ripples out, transforming organizations, enterprises, ecosystems, and the society around us.

Pamela Moss at the University of Michigan says:

Étienne Wenger, co-author of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities and author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity asserts that human knowing is fundamentally a social act.⁵⁰ By hearing about the experiences of others, you mash up snippets of data, add them to your own, and fit them into your sense of who you are and what you can do—together and with others. Learning “changes who we are by changing our ability to participate, to belong, and to experience our life and the world as meaningful.”⁵¹

Training, knowledge management, good leadership, and a whole host of organizational practices can add to an environment where people learn, but people can learn without this assistance, too.

Content and communities are shaping how people find and connect with each other.
—Gautam Ghosh

The 70-20-10 model explains that the vast majority of learning occurs as part of daily work. Seventy in the model refers to the learning and development that takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving. Twenty denotes development that comes from other people through our networks, informal or formal feedback, mentoring, coaching, and other social activities. Ten refers to formal training and development activities. 

The numbers originated in a study by Morgan McCall and others at the Center for Creative Leadership. A group of successful managers reported this ratio as the way their own development happened. “This isn’t a rule,” says Charles Jennings, former chief learning officer at Thomson Reuters and co-author of Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud. “Learning and development is always context dependent. Research over the past 40 years has increasingly shown that informal and on-the-job learning is pervasive and is a key indicator of success. People who actively and regularly carry out on-the-job learning through their experiences, through practice, through conversations, and through active reflection will outperform their peers who don’t do this.”

Studies have shown that the performance increases can be as much as threefold, and that employee engagement can be more than doubled.⁵²

Reiterates Jennings: “70:20:10 is not about the numbers. The numbers simply remind us most learning happens naturally as part of the daily workflow, through doing our work, and through conversations with colleagues and with experts.” 

“…most learning happens naturally as part of the daily workflow, through doing our work, and through conversations with colleagues and with experts.”

—Charles Jennings

To help see learning in a broader way, think of five people you communicate with and then identify at least three things you learned from each. Most people find this easier than recalling information they learned in a formal setting—not because they weren’t offered useful topics to learn—but because when we connect with people, the exchange sticks with us. That engagement calls up something from within us or connects with an emotion, and that mental dance leaves a footprint we can walk in again. Reflecting on it later improves learning even more.

Some formal training programs are designed for gaining new skills or competencies. New emergency medical technicians may not remember all the steps for CPR, but when they need to use it, they know what to do. That learning is about more than recall, too. It’s also about building muscle memory and a warehouse of options when the need to resuscitate someone arises.

Other training programs are for expanding our thinking or capacity to deal with situations ahead. The same is true of learning with people. This also comes from the community around us, in person or online.

The traditional model of corporate training, where experts disseminate knowledge in one-time training events or all-day presentations, is being modernized. It needs to take full advantage of the larger opportunity for incidental learning, learning from interacting with others, and learning along the way in the course of work.

A social learning culture thrives when people don’t fear feedback. This is when people ask other people to be part of their ideas.
—Sumeet Moghe

“To learn is to optimize the quality of one’s networks,” says Jay Cross, author of the Informal Learning Blog and co-author of Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud. “Learning is social. Most learning is collaborative. Other people are providing the context and the need, even if they’re not in the room.”⁵³

“Over 60 years ago, W. Edwards Deming encouraged management to drive out fear and break down barriers between departments, and still worry and walls are the two constants that most organizations share,” says corporate trainer Steve LeBlanc. “If a culture is truly focused on service, the most pressing question to ask is, ‘How can I help you?’ How can I help you succeed? How can I help you ask strong questions, take wise risks and deliver great content? How can I help you prosper? Most importantly, how can I help you learn and make new connections? How can I help you serve the larger group, of which we are both a part? Yet in most classrooms, people are prevented from helping each other learn and succeed.”⁵⁴

Organizations and individuals will not be sufficiently served by only receiving formal training. Diverse backgrounds and learning styles, and especially the complexity of people’s jobs, also determine what and how they learn. More critically, much of what needs to be learned is moving faster than we can create relevant, structured learning opportunities. Traditional training methods may be useful for teaching highly specific tasks or safety procedures, but evolving practices require more. Ad hoc and self-directed learning becomes a key strategy when we need to move fast.

“Learning is social. Most learning is collaborative. Other people are providing the context and the need, even if they’re not in the room.”

—Jay Cross

The new social learning, which centers on information sharing, collaboration, and co-creation, not instruction, implies that the notion of training needs to expand. Jane Hart, founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, points out that “workplace learning is no longer something that is wholly owned and managed by L&D; everyone now has access to resources and tools to solve their own problems. So the [new] role of a learning consultant is to work closely with teams and individuals in order to enable and support solutions that best suit them.”⁵⁵

“Learning has always been social. That’s not the innovation here. It is our relationship with the learning process that is the innovation,” says Allison Anderson, curator and long-time corporate educator.

Studies show that we learn what we need to solve problems and inform decisions in the real world. Learning and work strategist Harold Jarche often says, “Work is learning and learning is the work.⁵⁶

Knowledge acquired but never put to use is usually forgotten. We may act as if we care about learning something and go through the motions, but we will forget it unless it is something we want to learn and it fits how we work.

Social learning is especially good at showing us that for any crisis, or just to satisfy our curiosity, there is a network to support us at any time. We can load the boat. It’s what Howard Rheingold, who teaches about social media and virtual community (a term he coined) and is the author of many books, including Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, describes as the “online brain trust representing a highly varied accumulation of expertise.”⁵⁷

Social learning is also very good at giving people a view into the little moments that happen between big activities, modeling behavior for others to observe, retain, and replicate—or avoid. We look across the tweet stream and tuck away lessons of finessed customer service calls, graceful endings to overlong presentations, and recoveries from cultural faux pas in front of visiting clients. Together we are better.

New behaviours emerge as work is done in new ways.
—Harold Jarche

Social learning creates a way to remind us at work that people are not things to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. We are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we start limiting them. We must examine the concept of leading and following, learning and knowing, with new and focused eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.⁵⁸

How to Respond to Critics

One of the largest roadblocks for organizations struggling to get started is having the courage to face those who think what you’re doing is dangerous or dumb. Maybe they have heard a story of someone doing something that scares them. Perhaps it’s the unknown itself. In chapter four we uncover just about anything that could go wrong and address how to turn that around. Here are the most common stumbling blocks we hear about with regard to social learning and ways we believe you can address them.

“If a culture is truly focused on service, the most pressing question to ask is, ‘How can I help you?’ How can I help you succeed?”

—Steve LeBlanc

Critique 1: Using social media at work is a waste of time and productivity. Socializing can seem frivolous to people who haven’t connected it with the benefits of building relationships, accessing information from untapped corners of the organization, or feeling connected to co-workers so work seems like less of a chore.

Even in the most progressive organizations we talk with, at least one or two people said they didn’t want their staff to waste time on platforms like this. “They should be doing their work, not be on online or reading social media streams.”

An extremely security conscious organization, very worried people would use social tools to waste time, invited a consultant in to speak to their senior leadership team. These leaders were anxious to learn how other organizations were addressing social media concerns. It soon became obvious they were not interested in allowing these tools into their halls, so much as they were in learning how they could provide services to those in other organizations in order to mitigate what they perceived as inordinate risks stemming from the use of such tools.

As the speaker entered their building, she passed through a metal detector, then was required to put all of her electronic devices into a locker from which she could retrieve them on the way out. These people were serious about not giving access to their workforce. The speaker gave her talk and had a lengthy sit down meeting with the leaders. At that point, when she often mentions people are using these tools with or without permission, she stopped, noting this was the first organization she’d been in where she knew that was not the case—but that it would likely be the situation with any organization they partnered with.

Social learning tools can make hidden practices and knowledge available to an org. Like buried treasure.
—Jason Willensky

After collecting her belongings and getting into her car, a noise caught her attention in the vehicle beside her. A worker was in his car, typing on his smartphone’s keyboard. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed another employee in her car, and then several more. As she drove through the car park, mid-afternoon on a weekday, she realized that despite the organization’s most diligent policies, people were accessing social tools from the privacy of their vehicles.

It doesn’t matter what policies or extreme precautions are put in place. These tools are now ubiquitous, with more people across the world having an active presence on Facebook than comprise the populations of Russia and all of the European countries combined.

How much productivity was being lost by these people in their cars, having to physically go around the system to connect in a way that met their needs? While we will provide many benefits to using social tools in this book, the bottom line is that people will use these tools even if you, personally, or the critic you work with (or for), don’t find value in them. There may be no way to provide any more evidence than their listening to the words of people they know and trust who do find value.

Critique 2: People will say inappropriate things. If someone puts inappropriate content on the office door, you don’t remove the door. If someone makes a tasteless joke over the telephone, you don’t take away the phone. Social tools are often held to higher standards than traditional business tools because they are new, and bad stories circulate—go viral—quickly.

Rather than blame collaborative systems, educate people how to use them effectively for work. Social tools are the future of collaboration and learning at work, so the more you prepare people for how to use the tools respectfully, and how to apply good social practices, the better.

Andi Campbell, vice president of human resources at LAZ Parking, responds to this criticism simply, “If we don’t trust our employees, we have a much larger issue here.”

“Learning has always been social. That’s not the innovation here. It is our relationship with the learning process that is the innovation.”

—Allison Anderson

Critique 3: People will post incorrect information. One leader we spoke with expressed his concern this way, “Our employees may someday graffiti versions of our logo all over town, but we don’t want to hand out spray paint.” He feared that encouraging the use of social tools would encourage his people to write posts he wouldn’t approve of.

We asked in return, “Would you rather give people a chance to surface what they know and get it corrected by their peers when it’s wrong, or for them to continue believing (and likely repeating) incorrect information over time?”

Details of wide-ranging inaccuracy have always spread between co-workers and the market you serve. Information (both true, and not true) about your organization seeps out when people talk in restaurants over lunch or speak on a mobile phone while waiting in line at the post office. When you provide venues where people can share peer-to-peer and be accountable, the best information rises to the top because many people have rated it as useful. Different voices can weigh in and correct what’s wrong. If anything, organizations have more stories about how people rectify misnomers quickly, rather than how people make statements that are untrue. When questions and answers take place in public, people are more apt to correct misrepresented facts, old data, and rumors or speculation and, realizing their responses will be widely seen, work toward accuracy (or at least what they perceive it to be).

A network is the structure of culture.
—Karen Stephenson

In an age of transparency, giving people a way to work together toward achieving greater accuracy of information makes more sense than keeping inaccuracies under wraps.

Critique 4: Senior leaders won’t embrace social media for communications. We often hear this critique as a reason not to pursue social approaches. This year it’s very possible executives (and perhaps people at different levels throughout the organization) won’t see value or understand how using social tools can actually create more time in their overburdened lives. For many, those objections will fall away as, over time, working in these ways becomes the norm across society.

For others, active participation is simply a matter of time and economics. At least one organization we know created a way for people to share their thoughts without spending much time learning all the ins and outs of the social platform. Although they also created incentives for people to master the tools, they created less high-touch approaches, too.

For instance, they created an email address where anyone within the company could send what they’d written (in an email, a memo, or even—with good penmanship—on a napkin), which would be received by a team of writers who would turn the message into a blog post and publish it on the sender’s behalf.

“Work is learning, and learning is the work.”

—Harold Jarche

At first this approach received criticism from some employees for not being authentic, a cornerstone principle of working socially. When a senior leader addressed this head on (with the help of one of the writers), those in the organization empathized. He explained that he had written the gist of the messages and even provided a calculation of the cost of his time. It wasn’t cost effective for him to also master social-platform tools. He hoped to someday, but not amid his current priorities. He also pointed out that almost all of his correspondence was routinely edited, and that editors also were available to those in more junior roles who didn’t have confidence in their writing skills.

People may prefer to ease into working socially. Status updates work their way in because an enterprise tool that can be implemented for free gets added to the intranet. Employees may be encouraged to comment on company blogs or to blog on their own. Perhaps an employee directory goes online and then someone creates a wiki to take notes at meetings. In some organizations, many adopt it, some even sponsor it; it needn’t be universally supported to be effective.

This is what embracing social media and the new social learning looks like. It’s a process of adapting and adopting. Begin where you are and build where it suits your culture and environment. Learn as you go.

Critique 5: Social learning will distract from the changes we need to make in our business. Inevitably, every organization needs to change how it works in some fundamental way. That’s the nature of progress. The trouble is, many change efforts fail in large part because the people being asked to change aren’t included in the process.⁵⁹ Social systems give people a view into the organization and what their colleagues are doing, which can bring them into the heart of the change itself.

Ben Brooks, business coach, describes change management as an arc or a journey, getting people to move from point A to point B. “Some leaders will obsess about the route or the distance, but they fail to think about what it takes to actually get people in motion, in the same direction. At the beginning, change within an organization is like beginning a 5K race with every one of your staff. While leaders may like to believe everyone will start at the same place and will go in the same direction, at the same pace, your people will behave more like cats than roadrunners. Some will barely even notice or care that there’s a race going on. Some will scatter, some will go backwards; few will move at the same pace. Change requires planning and allowing humanity to occur, not assuming people will behave like programmed, compliant robots,” says Brooks.

Conversation + concepts converge on social learning.
—Kare Anderson

“We have different attention spans, comfort levels. We create complicated project plans, and then only think about people at the end. It’s as if the people who are impacted by the change deserve no more thought or support than a dollop of sour cream on the top of a loaded baked potato. In reality, empathetic and practical change support needs to be embedded into the process, not a layer you smear on at the end.”

Brooks, who personally was responsible for a very large corporate transformation, sees four distinct stages of change, each of which can be accelerated when an organization is in the habit of working together in social ways. These are focused less on the range of emotions we can expect humans to have in the face of change. Rather these are like mile markers on the journey between point A and B.

First there is awareness. Have people heard about the change? Do they directly have it in their ambient awareness? Next, understanding. Do people have a detailed understanding of it and does it make sense to them? Do they understand why the organization is making this change? After that is embodiment. Are people internalizing the changes—starting to run the race? Are they doing something differently than before, becoming walking-and-talking examples of the change, pulling other people in? Has their behavior started to change? Finally, there is accountability. Are people being recognized and feeling accountable? Are early adopters being celebrated and treated like champions? Is there now a social upside to working in new ways? And are the laggards being identified and addressed?⁶⁰

“Change requires planning and allowing humanity to occur.”

—Ben Brooks

These are the types of shifts organizations can excel at as they work out loud, with one another, in the flow of work. Each of these stages can be deepened and accelerated when people can see their peers also participating in the journey. No matter how comfortable people feel with change, knowing they are not alone can improve the situation. Sensing people are working together spurs them on as they take action.

Critique 6: People need training, not socializing. Learning socially does not replace training. It may overlap a little and complement a lot, but it can address the knowledge transfer that training may never get to.

Ellen Wagner, partner in Sage Road Solutions, notes that “workplace success has shifted from individual accomplishment to teams, communities of practice, and collaboration. Today we assess personal mastery of knowledge and skills with how well people can leverage their interconnected networks of resources, information, and subject matter specialists.”⁶¹

“The most significant thing going on in workplace training is that we have punched through the walls of the classroom to allow experts and peers to bring their messages closer to work and life through technology,” adds Allison Rossett, professor emerita of educational technology at San Diego State University. “I had my doubts about the ‘learningfulness’ of social networks until I began to use one in a graduate class on performance consulting. My students worked in teams, conducted research, created presentations, sought experts, stirred up conversations—even conflict—and engaged hundreds of people beyond our registered classmates. It was much better in almost every way.”⁶²

Focus on Social Business and Social Learning will follow.
—Terrence Wing

Critique 7: Collaborative systems compromise classified information. Organizations such as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Boston Children’s Hospital, National Australian Bank, and the Mayo Clinic use social media widely, even though their data are very sensitive. Rather than pronounce this new approach unfit for their environments, they practice good governance. They remind people to participate in online information-sharing communities with a full understanding that they bear responsibility for protecting sensitive or classified details.

As Chris Rasmussen, in the intelligence community once pointed out, “If you bring too many locks into an overly cautious culture, that’s all you get: locks.”

Critique 8: Social practices can’t be governed. Rather than start with a large, heavy-handed policy condemning the use of social media, put in place simple rules stating when people should use which tool to communicate, create, or share specific types of information. Make it easier for people to classify information they create. Specify which data and content are appropriate for what use—especially use within the company. Also, the fact that people can see what others share provides a reason to self-monitor and for people to monitor each other. See the Appendix for examples of governance policies.

“If you bring too many locks into an overly cautious culture, that’s all you get: locks.”

—Chris Rasmussen

Critique 9: Social practices can’t be measured. People who say there is “no way to measure this social stuff,” are often really saying it seems too tacit and ephemeral. However, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to measure and analyze newly surfaced value in their organizations, which derives from people working in social ways.

Understanding and using this analysis to make smart decisions requires focusing on what you aim to accomplish and the many factors that led to where you’ve arrived. There’s a fundamental disconnect—perhaps several—between new social and collaborative practices, and the leaders who are interested in measuring their value.

Most social platforms used within enterprises include some analytics capabilities. At minimum, they can tell you how many people logged in (initiative), how many people came back, presumably because they found value (persistence), how the network expanded (connection), and how technology use changed; for example, if there were fewer documents sent across email (transition).

You can analyze what people are searching for and map what they find. You can analyze not only where people go with their social tools, but also how they get there, how long they stay, and what they do when they are there. Although this does not verify the transfer of knowledge or skills, it is a pretty good indication.

Good measures look at functional outcomes rather than simply asking, “Did they learn?” or “Were they social?” There is little value to the organization if people don’t apply what they take in. The best measures go the next step and connect the use of new skills and knowledge with how it affects numerous measures, including the bottom line.

There are now approaches to measure the network, the ripples of impact, the engagement, and even the goodness of an organization based on how people are interacting, collaborating, and working together.

Chapter 5 is dedicated to the many ways it is possible to analyze and understand the connection between social learning and returning value to the organization.

Critique 10: Employee engagement efforts don’t improve the bottom line. Engagement is situational, and varies by firm, region, and organizational culture. One-size-fits-all models rarely work in actually engaging people who are already fighting a culture that doesn’t value people’s perspectives or that doesn’t look at the underlying factors that support company growth.

Laurie Bassi, co-author of Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era and CEO of McBassi & Company, points out that increasing employee engagement alone doesn’t lead to increased business performance. “To drive better sales results, an organization should focus on those items that are actually driving sales,” she says.

When you ask people if they would refer your company to friends as a good place to work and if they intend to stay with your organization, you’re looking less at engagement, more at the drivers that engage people at work.

A connected workforce may increase the likelihood sales people feel connected to their co-workers so they have less interest in changing employers, but it’s not guaranteed to increase sales. Leaders who “measure engagement without also understanding what’s driving business results are missing an opportunity to align their efforts with the efforts to address organizational business challenges,” adds Bassi.⁶⁴

Organizations that value and develop their people will be more successful than their competitors, not because of some engagement score, but because they are addressing the roots of personal drive and doing good to become great.

The Next Level

Senior leaders consider employees’ knowledge a strategic priority, yet they often leave the topic of learning out of strategy discussions because years ago they relegated it to the training department. Over the past 20 years, companies have strived to transform organizational learning by streamlining the training function and moving courses online. That doesn’t address the deeper dilemma: Training and learning are not the same thing.

In our view, training describes an outside-in approach to providing known quantifiable content, while learning describes an inside-out process that originates with the learner’s desire to know, either long held or spontaneously arising from recent events or a moving interaction.

A community is about having passionate members that belong.
—Sandy Carter

The new social learning fosters an environment where people readily and easily pick up new knowledge and skills as the world shifts around them, meeting the demands of a constantly changing mobile world.

The new social learning transcends social media, training, or workplace learning practices of the past because it offers 1) more information sources: access to people who can lessen your uncertainty with vetted data, presentations, research, and wide perspectives that can help make your case (or your decision) easier; 2) more dissemination points: people can self-serve their needs by accessing your resources, giving you back your time and simultaneously meeting their needs; and 3) an open approach: wide networks of communicators and collaborators who can help work flow.

If this is your first step into social media for learning, you are not alone. And if you’re one of the veterans, please leverage these new tools and technologies to share your knowledge and collaborate with us all.

Informing Decisions

Many of the following chapters begin with a case study from an organization deeply engaged in using social media to learn. We end this opening chapter, intended to provide context for the specific approaches addressed ahead, with the story of an organization using social media to offer context and make decisions clear.

Although your organization and the CIA may seem to have nothing in common, their objectives are not so different from those of every organization.

In 2006, a team of analysts at the CIA was tapped to replace an old print-based publication, primarily containing information from the president’s intelligence briefing or about a crisis that had come to light. Like a newspaper, a certain amount of space was reserved for graphics and the rest was used for text. It worked, but it never shined.

Rather than build on what they already had, they started fresh, creating a new structure with social media sensibilities and a brighter vision.

The result is a daily electronic publication to update senior policy and security officials on trends and news overseas that have the potential to affect U.S. interests. The analysis in the publication is classified, noting the methods used to acquire the information and the sensitivity of the topics it contains. More than just a newspaper, it anticipates developments and makes projections about the future.

The CIA calls it the CIA World Intelligence Review (WIRe) because the world is what they cover, intelligence is their vocation, and review is what they do.

The WIRe is the CIA’s collective and dynamic online presence. The WIRe leverages innovative tools and processes to make the richness of the CIA’s content, including text, multimedia, graphics, and video, accessible wherever and whenever needed. Updated throughout the day, the WIRe’s front page is dynamic and customizable, and it delivers reader-specific intelligence in a timely manner. The WIRe makes it easy to navigate volumes of reporting by linking analysis with source materials and providing robust search and feedback capabilities to support knowledge management.

For the CIA, being “central” doesn’t simply reflect the title of a director, the name of the organization, or its role for legislators. It refers to being central, being essential to their particular customers. The organization aims to lead the way, at the center, pioneering in times of change through demonstrating applied leadership.

In creating the WIRe, the team followed four “tracks.” These objectives mirror those of many organizations pursuing a new vision: Retire and replace what no longer works. Get better. Learn from errors. Commit to getting it right.

Keep it open, searchable, accessible. There is no evolution in an echo chamber. There is no oxygen there.
—Jeannette Campos

Embrace the best of what’s being done in the private sector and apply it to intelligence, providing it in a user-friendly, online way. Customers accustomed to the BBC.com or Google News would know how to use this.

1. Develop a relationship with customers.

2. Communicate with them; don’t just transmit information to them.

3. Pay attention to how they interact with the information and make data-driven improvements because of it.

4. Recognize that we won’t always know how social media tools fit or how they will apply to us, but innovation and flexibility are part of our mission, and we’ll weave them into our activity.

Although these four objectives have grown over time, the team still lives by them, mindful that customers don’t purchase the WIRe with money; they invest in it with their time. And invest they have. The new system has eclipsed the old system that had about 750 viewers a day. The system now has more than 100,000 registered users across the globe. It has become the gold standard for information sharing in the U.S. government. It is printed out as part of the president’s briefing, read at the cabinet level, and added to and read online by sailors and soldiers implementing national security. In these ways, it’s as far reaching as it is impactful.

The WIRe’s purpose is to inform decisions, revealing what people think about as they make decisions. The WIRe is the CIA’s voice, expressing as an institution its perspective on a topic. Now it also provides a means to express knowledge in a collaborative space others can link to and from, add to, and learn with, so it no longer represents discrete, isolated data. It expresses personal interaction attached to relevant information that with a few clicks connects to all other relevant information. It’s interconnected and put into the context of what’s going on in the world.

Rather than tell the story of a leader in an emerging government through words or a few static images, the WIRe can show a video clip, perhaps captured by a spectator, of how the leader whips up the crowd with a passion and a presentation style that reaches into the hearts of his audience. Anyone seeing that clip can understand why he is so powerful.

With that, producers of intelligence can make points more vibrantly, creating presentations with great impact. Conveying the message goes beyond basic audio, video, and text sharing. Media are integrated from multiple sources and delivered and constructed by many people. People can discover a framework of intelligence relationships and see that everything is connected, for the most accurate representation.

In addition to shared intelligence published by the WIRe team, those viewing the information create new knowledge through the paths they take in their discovery, the comments they leave, and the tags and social bookmarks they create. Each intelligence gatherer—“learner” as it were—can see what someone else navigated to or tagged from a particular point of departure, then see what else she or he tagged as relevant for making informed decisions. By observing one another’s tags and navigation, people can also discover other people and groups interested in similar topics, potentially making decisions about similar things. This facilitates new relationships and new perspectives.

The WIRe becomes a combination of daily intelligence and a grouping of topics, trails of interests, and search queries, leaving an archive that can satisfy a series of needs from customers that may not exist yet. Rather than try to tailor a presentation to meet those various needs, the WIRe becomes a diamond that in its raw form has value in itself. What gives it sparkle is the ability for each decision maker, each person seeking timely information, to cut in and look at it through an individual lens, looking for different facets. It might be that the detail you want is on the homepage, the highlights presented by the WIRe team, or through an RSS feed you create and view. A regional page gives you another aspect, and topic areas a third.

Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them.
—Albert-László Barabási

What makes it unlike systems that have come before it within or outside government is that it works in seemingly conflicting worlds—that of wide-open sharing and that of the highest security. Both extremes are dangerous. As founding editor-in-chief of the WIRe, Geoffrey Fowler, says, “Share too broadly, and people can die. Hold your information too closely, decisions can be ill-informed, and people can die. Our responsibility is to share broadly and securely—to make certain that these two critical needs are not viewed as incompatible extremes. The truth of the intelligence business is that information sharing and information security need to co-exist.”⁶⁵

The WIRe provides openness and security in tandem by building on the CIA’s security clearance system. Although there are restrictions, people using the system can search all the data holdings and discover trails leading to information they didn’t even know existed. The organizational culture is moving from one focused exclusively on the need to know to one recognizing that success depends on the need to share. The WIRe focuses more on intelligence than the locks and walls between groups.

Fowler adds, “When I look back over the past few years, I see the evolution and the growth of a program, of an organization, and of a community. I see learning. I see dynamic interaction among experts in social and online media and those involved in the creation and conveyance of intelligence. It’s time to expand that conversation, to talk about innovation beyond tools—to talk about innovation as an art, as a behavior, and as a necessity for survival and progress. Growth and adaptation are part of a journey, one that cannot be successful if taken alone. And so we come together.”

The CIA’s ongoing interest and work with social media tools inspires us in our work. Its attention to both security and distribution reminded us as we wrote this book that systems should be facilitators for learning, not gatekeepers or megaphones. Social media can and should provide a medium for what people need now to make educated decisions. Working together, each of us, like pebbles tossed in a pond, can make both ripples and waves.

Go far, go together.