Enterprise Micro-Learning

This article originally appeared on Marcia Conner’s Fast Company expert blog "Learn at All Levels" October 12, 2008. There are online comments there too.

If you can’t fathom how Twitter can help your company, read on.

When a student opened fire on the Virginia Tech campus last year, the school had no systematic way to alert those in harm’s way. In the days that followed, organizations nationwide began asking, "Does my organization have the ability, in a few minutes, in the event of a crisis, to notify everyone involved?" What if fire, an earthquake, an explosion, or a hurricane rendered our email and phone systems useless? How would people receive information critical to their lives?

Today organizations are considering how to systematically use micro-messaging, an emerging communications channel, made possible by Twitter and tools like it, to connect with the people they care about most. It allows organizations to reach people’s desktops, laptops, and devices already in pockets and purses without any dependency on local email servers or a phone tree.

In a few compact sentences, these utilities can quickly and effectively convey text or image messages across an extended enterprise, a decentralized workforce, a dispersed campus, a community of practice, a small group of friends, or just one person who needs to know.

Also referred to as micro-blogging and micro-sharing, micro-messaging tools prove enterprise software need not be boring and difficult. It can be easy, engaging, portable, and rewarding.

With the unveiling of enterprise-focused Twitter cousins such as Yammer, ESME, Headmix and SocialText3, managers can now bring micro-messaging capabilities in-house with the security of working behind the firewall to protect confidential information and the potential for explicit links back into enterprise-strength systems.

Enterprise micro-messaging can help address the dueling dilemmas organizations face — needing to move knowledge where people need it now as they work through business processes, while relieving worries and fears information is leaking out of the organization too easily.

Although some execs ban these tools and consumer counterparts widely available today, doing so leaves their organizations out of an important loop encompassing customers, partner networks and, even, families. This month’s issue of Human Resources Executive featured these tools on their front page and over the summer, technology market consultancy Gartner added micro-messaging to its list of technologies that will transform business over the next two to five years.

Twitter, a public micro-messaging network used by many early adopters, has become such an integral part of my own professional practice and personal brain-building. I use them to connect, share, and discover information far beyond any other network. I’ve grown to realize the field might better be thought of as micro-learning where the conduit is tiny and the lessons spread are vast. Across an enterprise — be it around the globe or down the hall — the learning potential is endless, while the opportunities to connect to knowledge are exploding in number and variety.

I use it in a way similar to how I touch base with my friends and family, briefly and frequently, and I now extend that level of care to involve my coworkers and business partners. I can find someone to review an article as effortlessly as I can offer personal experience to a colleague on how to select a webinar platform or which organizations have successfully launched their own brand Wikipedia. This is all akin to the magic of open-source software, created through public grassroots collaboration.

Whether I’m working remotely or onsite, I find micro-messaging (micro-learning?) mediates a conversation where what we’re learning is not merely exchanged. Knowledge is extended, transformed, reshaped, and built on as we actually create new trains of thought.

See if any of these other benefits would prove valuable to your extended organization and your developing communications plans.

Individualized Updates

The meeting in the Wintergreen room moved to Culpepper… The sandwich cart won’t be downstairs today… The supplier has only two mini-laptops lefts… Reviews are due on Friday… A colleague can’t make the pitch in the morning so I’m on… Email is sent… Directions are scribbled on paper affixed to a door… A high priority phone message is left… I wade through fourteen screens. Everyday stuff.

More common than occasional safety announcement, companies have operational updates that need to reach people at certain times to coordinate the dance that is an organization. There’s information each participant in an organizational ecosystem needs to learn to successfully help that enterprise succeed. This information can be broadcast to those needing a reminder about the speaker in the auditorium (until it becomes habit that’s the place to be Friday afternoons), narrowcast to groups like those whose meeting locale has changed or directed to individuals who have paperwork being processed.

Although most messages are generated by people (for instance someone from HR, accounting, at the front desk or in legal), some can be automated to inform people at critical times. An order processing system can kick out events and exceptions. A benefits system can signal coverage changes and enrollment deadlines. A learning management system can prompt it’s time for a certification renewal or a newly available online course. Micro-messaging systems offer unified access for information relevant to each of us, one at a time and all at the same time.

Yet that’s still only half of the story for organizational communication. I can follow news about my meetings, my paperwork or my provisions and I can also — here’s where it gets exciting — (at my own peril) select to be blissfully ignorant. We are far more attentive when we can actively choose to pay attention to what matters to us, and we feel the most empowered when we can select to organize our lives in ways that don’t overwhelm us and actually create value. Micro-messaging can be:

Me-centered. When individuals, rather than senders or suppliers, choose who to and how to trail interesting people, groups or even favorite key words, it heralds the beginning of a Network of Me. As needs and interests change over time, messaging systems let us adjust our inputs and conversations quickly. The network becomes a distributed relevancy mechanism to reach me wherever I am and on my own terms.

Free-market. Offer me information that matters to me, and I’ll follow what you have to say. Spit out junk, and I will stop the flow of information to the device in my hand or the screen in front of me. Instead, I’ll relegate it to the more cumbersome systems, available in the background, and look at them only when I have extra time.

Borderless options. There is a nothing to stop an organization from also publishing (or even just syndicating their micro-messages) to the intranet, communications wiki, personal dashboards, or even an electronic ticker tape running through the lobby.

Nestled between the big blocks called work, micro-messaging enables a people-focused value network and truly modern supply chain. Everyday stuff.

Collective Intelligence

A teammate goes to a conference and promises to share highlights in real-time… Anyone know the source of this stat I heard on my way into work?… I want to include customer stories in a whitepaper I’m writing… Is there a way the spreadsheet template can provide mean rather than average?… I’m new around here and wonder if anyone could use my expertise… My stuff and your stuff, together.

Too frequently organizational knowledge-sharing mirrors the news-cycle society around us, in which we share the highs and lows, ignoring the ordinary stuff in the middle. It’s in that middle ground people make sense of the work done around them, understand how we can play a part to help fulfill the vision, and know where we can turn to find the help we need. It’s the middle stuff that’s truly interesting and helps us connect with one another.

One micro-message I saw said, "You all make me feel like I’m always surrounded by the most brilliant people on earth." Another said, "I can get an answer to practically any question within minutes!" When we were beside one another as we did the work, we conveyed the information flow with every breath. Now to get smarter, we must connect intentionally.

Although receiving news from the enterprise meme-stream helps us work within the systems around us, learning with and from the people around us (physically or virtually in our space) increases organizational value.

Information we glean from one another exhibits bird-like flocking behavior, joining with other information that adds more value to it, creating clusters of concepts with the capacity to become something stronger than we can come up with alone.

Effortless-discovery. Learning often entails asking people how to do things. The trouble is, no matter our age, we customarily ask the person closest to us rather than someone known to have the right answer. Micro-messaging helps us reach the right people without even requiring us to know who they are. You can also enlist help en masse by asking large groups of people to focus on the same issue for a short burst of time to quickly bring about a creative solution.

Far-reaching collaboration. Most micro-messaging services require only an Internet connection so your colleagues and stakeholders in Australia, Ireland, Russia, Mexico and North Carolina can communicate, cooperate, and share information at the same time. Adding business partners, investors and customers in the learning mix no longer requires complex planning.

Culture-trickle. By identifying a few key influencers new hires can follow ephemeral information and vetted practices can be shared easily and in real-time with little burden on a designated guide. A directory of personable resident experts that can be followed through micro-messaging with one click makes targeted communication more efficient. Because these tools record exchanges, other people can watch how a concept, plan or project evolves.

In conjunction with individuals’ personal stream of reflections and observations, possibly with a link to a source for additional detail, the intelligence we gather and share becomes transparent and available to everyone. Organization power. My stuff and your stuff, together

Social Seaming

Liz in benefits rocks… I need more sleep… This project is going to change the world… Extra sandwiches in Culpepper (not everyone showed for the meeting)… Who borrowed my stapler?… My kid’s sick, heading home, ping me there. Stuff in between.

How we feel influences our productivity in both subtle and obvious ways. Something fills the moments between doing our work and reading all the lame emails preventing us from reading messages that matter. It contributes to us feeling on target or out of sorts. If those empty "thanks" and "lights on in the parking lot" notes moved to a micro-messaging system, one where we could choose to follow based on the quality of posts or the interest we had in what someone said, we’d probably free up enough time to contribute to the flow, too, and get back to feel on.

These slender messages are interstitial; they lie in and fill the seams of organizations. The threads help us collectively construct understanding, foster new connections and grow existing bonds, making for more agile perspectives, tighter teams, and resilient morale.

Detail intimacy. As organizations and society-at-large dismantle boundaries between personal and work life, they enrich corporate cultures as well as foster greater productivity and loyalty from people who have long-dreaded leaving their private life in the parking lot as they walked through the door. Micro-messages, the technological equivalent of water-cooler chat, offer us clues into those around us, leading us to help one another because we know and trust one another. It’s in the little learning moments where we’re reminded Jeff isn’t only a guy in product development, but a parent with a daughter about the same age as my son. My clients frequently tell me they have learned more about their coworkers and customers from their micro-messages and social media profiles than they have from working with one another for years.

Social serendipity. From technical information to breaking news, from what my friends are thinking about to what I need to be looking at and thinking about. These tools work similarly to how we converse while passing one another in the hallway, representing a live ecosystem that shifts from moment to moment, where it’s easier, faster and more effective for us to brain dump as events happen in a live and ongoing environment.

Life-stream immediacy. If you’re thinking, "…but my people have real work to be done," ask yourself this question: In the two minutes they have between a phone call and a report, would it be better for them to be sharing what they learned on the call or asking for insight for the report, rather than doodling, making a shopping list, or checking on their fantasy football spread? People need down time, change of pace time, rhythm of the day time, and for those of us who have discovered a goldmine in their micro-messages, we’ve been able to stay on task and gain a little peace. In-between.

Organizations are human creations and they change as people change. They adapt to serve social needs. Real-world knowledge sharing is social, business, and technical all rolled into one. An enterprise is an ecosystem of various parts all working together, even when they don’t know exactly how, and offering a simply way to reach the parts that doesn’t hamper the work getting on already can help us make great change. Micro-blogging is the capillary system.

Poet Nikki Giovanni said at the memorial service for those at Virginia Tech, "[we] embrace our own and reach out with open heart and hand to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, and not [yet] quite what we want to be."

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Marcia Conner >> www.marciaconner.com

Face to Facebook Learning

This article originally appeared on Marcia Conner’s Fast Company expert blog "Learn at All Levels" September 29, 2008. There are online comments there too.

I’m a voracious learner. In addition to reading magazines, books, blogs, tweets, and faces, I persistently look for patterns, connections, anomalies and what’s new. I tolerated school only because it was where my friends were and because occasionally I could talk with adults who seemed to know a bit about topics that might someday matter.

The Internet’s debut seemed better suited for my unmitigating curiosity. The sites I tunneled to represented people with knowledge and perspective I could learn from around the clock. My brainspan soared. Still, I knew there was more, locked inside people’s heads, unfolding in the little moments between the times they took to post something profound.

Although my professional life often focuses on helping organizations understand learning across generations, my personal time is spent testing my theories in my own social environment, with my colleagues, with my family, and sometimes with those in line at the market or boarding a plane.

My real-world lab validates ample research people are learning from one another all the time. While we learn some details, theorems, and history from people who are school teachers, corporate trainers and college professors, more than 75% of what we learn comes from experiences outside of any formal education program and from people we know outside the walls of any class.

It was from this perspective I felt disoriented as a perspective client used Compete Inc.’s analysis of what people do on Facebook as proof (proof?) it’s not a place where people learn. The manager was echoing nonsense I hear from educators and business people alike who argue social networking does not constitute learning and that a platform like Facebook is too immature to foster authentic education.

Is it even possible to look through a personal profile or status update and not at least learn something? Do people still believe only big heavy formal intentional topics count?

A high school student sees what his friends did last weekend. A college student reads about and then signs on to a rebuilding trip in a hurricane-damaged city. A genNext employee discovers a conference where she can market the company. A boomer businessman finds a group of fellow entrepreneurial spirits. And a parent watches over her children without intruding into their lives. Each finds a place and a space on Facebook to learn.

Facebook provides a compelling outlet for people who enjoy learning, and it helps those seeking something else to accidentally and informally learn along the way.

As we build relationships with other people, we tap into their networks of knowledge and sense, creating learning webs, making our compound knowledge more valuable than compound interest.

If you’re still of the mindset that social media doesn’t foster deep or wide learning, consider Tom Kosnik, who teaches Global Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and has given Facebook a pivotal place in his work on the Global Leaders, Entrepreneurs, and Altruists Network (GLEAN). Although the network was launched in 1993, not until Facebook was there infrastructure to help team members across the globe work together for the common good.

Facebook has enabled:
1. Large numbers of members to meet one another individually.
2. Rapid survey research among the extended network.
3. Recent graduates to connect with employers looking for talent.
4. Organizing live learning events around the world.

Another Stanford professor BJ Fogg, from the Persuasive Technology Lab, teaches a course called The Psychology of Facebook where Facebook provides an integral part of the coursework itself.

Still not concrete enough for you? Medical Central is Elsevier’s community of medical students, researchers and professionals who come together on Facebook to share resources and exchange ideas. Posting videos of surgical procedures and blogs with breaking medical news, participants also learn together using more traditional medical textbooks and medical journals in modern ways.

Or how about the work of Hal Richman, who started the Convergence of Social and Business Networking group on Facebook to explore the learning he was seeing all around him. Early on he conducted a survey and 81% of group members said they like to merge their social and business worlds and 93% said they expected or aspired to meet people they will network and collaborate in the future. One qualitative response captured the essence of many others with, "It is important that business contacts get to see the real you. In that way you present a more rounded and credible personality who is more likely to engage others." Discussion topics were thoughtful and revealing, helping me as a group member to learn about how others were grappling with important emergent themes.

When Kimberly Samaha of the Bordeaux Energy Colloquium launched the Facebook group Sustainable Energy Futures to promote energy advances in developing nations, she hoped to gain the same sort of momentum as the Convergence group, and as a member of it too, she linked the two. Using some of the native capabilities of Facebook she introduced us to innovations in solar, biomass and hydro energy, not something many of the people in our group would or could have easily done on their own.

Young people are making these leaps, too.

A study of kids 9-17 by Grunwald Associates showed those using social network sites like Facebook are using social tools collaboratively, creatively, with specific project outcomes in mind, and they develop more complex and learning-related skills as their purposes change.

That probably plays well at Amherst College where only 1% of first-year students have landlines, and 99% have Facebook accounts.

I’m not advocating Facebook be used as a full-fledged classroom replacement system (yet) with all the bells, whistles, distractions, and seclusion those spaces afford. I’m also not so certain I’ve seen any one of those garner the, "getting to know one another first" authenticity that fosters face-to-face-quality trust that mitigates posturing. I’ll likely update my stance as new Facebook applications fill gaps and make the software a functional formal learning platform.

The power of the social graph (your social network and more) is that we observe people in new contexts, we reconnect in a visceral way with old friends and we see the potential for mobilizing like-minds for learning, amusement and even social good.

It’s time educators and business people embrace Facebook as part of a larger learning ecosystem supporting distributed learning, in real-time, for real-life, and rather than continue to talk about all that it’s not, consider all the advantages looking us in the face today.

Interested in learning more, visit my new group What are you learning on Facebook.

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Marcia Conner >> www.marciaconner.com

Get Smarter Than Smart

A CEO just asked me how to get his people under control. He believes he’s doing everything right so it must be his people who are all wrong. He reminds me of the teacher who prepares all summer and then come fall the wrong students arrive.

Even those smart enough to rise to positions of influence sometimes think the forces of good are only available from order (control) and the forces of evil are epitomized by chaos (kaos). I’m no Agent 99, but when anyone tells me they will get through a possible recession or the school year by clamping down on employees, students, customers, markets, or even time, I feel an urge to shout into my shoe.

Some aspects of leadership and learning will always be uncertain and out of our reach. Chaos is not our enemy; it accounts for the immune system, nature, boiling water, honey, the stock market, motherhood, and innovation. Chaos is change at work.

Chaos theory doesn’t avow the universe lacks order. It reminds us order is intricate and changeable, and that we ought to stop constantly trying to direct and predict.

Statesman and futurist Harlan Cleveland (1918–2008) — one of the smartest people I ever met — offered some hints from his own experience on how to conceive, plan, organize, and lead organizations in ways that best liberate ingenuity and maximize choice:

No individual can be truly in general charge of anything interesting or important. That means everyone involved is partly in charge. How big a part each participant plays will depend on how responsible he or she feels for the general outcome of the collective effort, and what he or she is willing to do about it.

Broader is better. The more people affected by a decision feel they were consulted about it, the more likely it is that the decision will stick.

Looser is better. The fewer and narrower the rules everyone must follow, the more room there is for individual discretion and initiative, small-group insights and innovations, regional adaptations, functional variations. Flexibility and informality are good for workers’ morale, constituency support, investor enthusiasm, and customer satisfaction.

Planning is not architecture; it’s more like fluid drive. Real-life planning is improvisation on a general sense of direction, announced by a few perhaps, but only after genuine consultation with the many who will need to improvise on it.

Information is for sharing, not hoarding. Planning staffs, systems analysis units, and others whose full-time assignment is to think should not report only in secret to some boss. Their relevant knowledge must be shared, sooner rather than later, with all those who might be able to use it to advance the organization’s purpose.

The most productive organizations flex enough for people to follow their heart while everyone does enough of what other people need them to do. If we demand people only do as they’re told, critical work goes unnoticed. If people have the authority to think for themselves (and could anything be more chaotic than that?), there’s a good chance they’ll see more broadly about their job than anyone else could.

Humans are capital not in the sense that they exist, like a five-axis machine sitting on a factory floor, but in the sense they can transform information and energy into more useful forms.

If someone tries to sell you control by clamping down on chaos, make sure you don’t get suckered into paying too dearly. For organizations to thrive, we need to figure out approaches, technologies, models, and systems which honor our whole-selves in the board room as much as in the lunch room and that generate enthusiasm, if not outright joy.

Nothing could be smarter.

 

Learn more about Harlan Cleveland from his book Nobody in Charge: Essays on the Future of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2002) and the opening chapter of Jim Clawson and my book, Creating a Learning Culture (Cambridge, 2004)

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Marcia Conner >> www.marciaconner.com