Jargon is so comforting. Here's a tasty piece that I've put together Frankenstein-styley from a number of people on Twitter to protect the innocent:
Seeking to leverage the virality of employees' social graphs for bold brain-friendly pull-learning initiatives?
The saddest thing about this sentence is that it actually kind of makes sense. The trouble is, if a full-on 'change agent' comes to your workplace and starts spouting off like this, they're not liable to get far. Can we rescue our Change Agent from this sticky situation?
Sticky situation. . .
Michael Eury (@stickylearning) has a great post on Viral Expansion Loops, among other things. He knows all about them - and now I do because he's part of my social graph.
- Design a learning resource (eg a wiki, intranet, LMS/VLE)
- Add content
- Add in a bit social networking magic (friending, commenting, <3-ing)
- Sit back and admire your handiwork**
In other words, it's Facebook or Twitter or Ning or Wikipedia or (cough) Babysham. But at work.
Bold Brain-Friendly Pull-learning Initiatives
As if that's not exciting enough you can also use your virally expanding social networking platform for learning - Facebook as a platform for eLearning 2.0!.
Instead of pushing people towards consultants and trainers and clunky eLearning courses, you reap the rewards of your employees socialising and learning from each other. They're pulled towards the honeypot (or the lobster trap) of the network and learn in the way that nature intended - by volunteering to share, observing peers and playing games.
A cynic might say that all this simply encourages people to do the things that come naturally but that the bureaucratic structures of pathological organisations prevents them from doing.
But let's forget the cynics. Back to our hapless jargon-ridden Change Agent. How can we express this idea in a way that even the most old-school, jaded, unnovative, just-two-more-months-till-retirement sexy executive will shout, "Hallelulah!"**
Or should we even try? Is this just another passing phase?
Tomorrow's post: why your intranet should be more like a Tokyo primary school concert.
PS Bonus points for anybody who can spot my rather Freudian typo on the above.
** Of course, without getting too carried away. Not forgetting to measure ROII, for instance. (That's not a typo, by the way)
[Image: Geek and Poke, daily geeky cartoons.]
For more on intranets (and the bold part of above is the bit where we scrap our current intranet solutions), here's a report on Intranet Usability from Jakob Nielsen. Note that it's mostly about 'tasks' and productivity. Which gives you a fairly clear idea of what most intranets are used for - booking travel, annual leave and downloading Word documents.
I'm not at all convinced that using an enterprise version of Facebook, for example, is the right way forward for any organisation that can't afford to make their own version that's at least as good as the real thing. This is one of the key lessons of Harry Beckwith's Selling the Invisible - you don't get to set the quality standards for your products, all your competitors do. Whether they're in your industry or not. It's not just the staff at theme parks who have to smile like the people at Disney. If you're intranet (or your eLearning) isn't like a 'real' website, people will switch off.
3 comments:
I was having a little trouble following your "Frankenstein" style post, but what caught my attention the most was
- Design a learning resource (eg a wiki, intranet, LMS/VLE)
- Add content
- Add in a bit social networking magic (friending, commenting, <3-ing)
- Sit back and admire your handiwork**
The problem is that it basically follows the the old KM way of capturing knowledge -- build a system for people to populate and Voila!!! They will spend their time filling it up!
However, people do want to help others, but they are not going to waste their time doing "knowledge dumps" on the chance that someone might come along and use it.
I particularly like this post, especially "Instead of pushing people towards consultants and trainers and clunky eLearning courses, you reap the rewards of your employees socialising and learning from each other. " It sums up the potential of social sites as (probably quite incidental, or even accidental) learning spaces.
I also see Donald's point above, my suggestion is to leave out the step "Add content" altogether, site design and successful implementation could ensure that use of the site organically builds content.
However, contrary to Donald's view, I don't see social sites as a 'knowledge dump' environment. Instead it is the very social nature of these sites that builds community and in turn motivates people to freely share knowledge. It is not 'on the chance that someone might come along'. Charities have also found that this works, (see the Heath Brothers book, Made to Stick) They describe how people donate more readily when they believe that their money is going to a specific (pictured) needy person rather than to some broad charitable organisation. On social sites such personalisation is helped by profile photos and short bios, it's true, people like to help real people.
Finally, I also agree with Simon that 'change agents' and the push approach are unlikely to work, as people tend to push back against pushing. I also alluded to this in the post that Simon kindly linked to in his post, in particular the term I coined, Permission Learning, http://bit.ly/b0xSR .
Thanks for stopping by, Donald. You're absolutely right of course. This was originally two posts but I split it up because it got a bit long.
Hope the second part clears up what I think about the 'sit back and admire your handiwork' part.
Slightly crestfallen that you couldn't follow it. But thank heavens somebody lets me know. I've noticed a few Tweets complaining about my writing style and I am trying to tone it down (a bit). Must try harder.
Michael, I completely agree with you about the 'add content' stage. (see above)
I'll add a decent link in to your Permission Learning post when I publish the second half of this.
Which I've just done. http://www.bfchirpy.com/2009/12/how-to-make-your-intranet-suck-less.html
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