Social Learning For Companies By Clive Roach

March 2014

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"Social learning is about extending the value of expert

information and infusing it with the knowledge and

expertise of an organization’s own employees.

It’s about making those learner insights scalable."

- John Ambrose, Skillsoft.

The Ability To Learn

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"The ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage

for any organization. Hyper-connected work environments

require people with better sense-making, collaboration, and

cooperation skills. Social learning plays a significant role in this.

Democratic workplaces that foster trust can share knowledge

better and faster" - Harold Jarche.

Harold Jarche is one of my favorite writers on the topic of

Social Learning. His quote about the ability to learn being the

only lasting competitive advantage for any organization is a key

one that many are looking at. What about you? What about

your company? Do you have opportunities to learn from your

work peers even when they are located on other continents?

Categorizing levels of learning and

understanding.

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Benjamin Bloom created a taxonomy for categorizing

levels of learning and understanding in the year 1956.

It has been revised since then with these verbs;

“creating, evaluating, analyzing,

applying, understanding, and

remembering”.

Here is that taxonomy

visualized with some

modern tools that

can be used

for each level:

"Perpetual Beta is the new reality"

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Harold Jarche calls the intersection of collaborative work,

social learning and connected leadership as the “perpetual

beta”. This sounds like a super way to describe the continual

learning that companies of all sizes are undergoing once they

start trying to apply social learning to achieve business

advantage and also to empower their employees.

Empowered and well connected employees are highly valued

and efficient because they can use their company internal

social media platforms to get answers to questions and can

collaborate with highly skilled and experienced people located

in different parts of the world.

"Perpetual Beta is the new reality"

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Intranets - My First Love

I have seen some great recent examples of this in my own

company over the years but it all started for me in this area

with Intranets created using FrontPage way back in 1997. I

created the first central Intranet for Thorn Lighting and then

found that like minded colleagues who I had never met were

connecting their local experimental Intranets to mine. This

created a network that kept growing, and became more and

more useful for the salesforce. They kept dialing in after work

using their modems from their homes. I learnt a lot from those

days especially about the value of connected relationships

with staff that I would never have known about if it was not for

those early connected Intranets.

Learning companies

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Learning companies

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A blog I recommended for further reading is Wirearchy by Jon

Husband... "Conversations are where information is shared,

knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right

things done. The only way to deal with ongoing change is to

create and sustain effective conversations – with your

customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone

else. Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in

order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will

work from here on out. The structure, tools and culture of

organizations will have to honor this fact. There’s no other way

it’s going to work“. Looking back at my humble Intranet days

using my Hayes modem and FrontPage 97 (with those lovely

FrontPage extensions) the quote from Jon Husband seems

very appropriate for the way ahead.

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I really like this case study from BASF. I learned a lot about

the success factors that they found while rolling out their

award winning enterprise social network which now has over

35,000 connected employees.

These are some of the sections that they have built:

• Corporate initiatives and corporate units

(Communities of Engagement).

These communities are founded by the organization itself to

facilitate dialog with employees.

• Work-groups and project teams (Communities of Practice).

These communities are set up by organizational units to

serve the organization. The main thrust is collaboration.

Case Study - Connect.BASF

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• Social networking groups (Communities of Interest).

Communities are set up by employees wishing to network

with like-minded people.

• Expert networks and professional groups (Communities of

Expertise).

Communities of Expertise are set up by employees to serve

the organization. Communities of this kind exist in a variety of

areas, including controlling, communication and project

management.

Read more about this intriguing example of social learning in a

large company, which started out small using a pilot.

Case Study - Connect.BASF

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"No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use

the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and

see how we can influence desired results. This is life in

perpetual Beta. Get used to it. Preparing for this will require

time, social learning, and management support"

- Harold Jarche

Blog post accompanying this SlideShare

Further Reading: • Don't Let Your Best-Connected People Become Bottlenecks

• On Leading, Managing and Co-creating in the Connected Workplace

• A Visual Guide to Social Learning six aspects of social learning

• Social learning is for human work

In summary

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I am a social media strategist, blogger and speaker about social media

marketing. Subscribe and learn about how to use and adopt Social media

for Marketing, and keep up with the latest news. Currently I am the Head of

Social Media for Philips Lighting. I am active with strategy development,

activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all

aspects of social media within Philips Lighting. I have been working in the

digital marketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering,

design and sales. In addition to this blog, I tweet daily on two Twitter

accounts, have two Facebook pages, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram,

and participate in many other social networks.

Connect with me via:

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