Comments (10)

By Dan Pontefract, 03/25/2010 9:35 PM

There is a dilemma that exists in the 90-9-1 phenomenon. Do we first require an organizational culture adaptation prior to any meaningful Enterprise 2.0 adoption? Thus, helping us reverse the order where, now, 90% of the population are active creators versus 1%?

Or, do Enterprise 2.0 tools need to become so simplistic, easy to use and of course generally available to an organization before a culture can be considered connected, flat and more collaborative?

It feels like a causality dilemma worth exploring.

Peter Bregman states that an easy way in which to begin changing an organization’s culture is by telling stories. That got me thinking. Perhaps, if we truly want to flip the 90-9-1 phenomenon to improve employee engagement, company productivity, future innovation, etc. we should get fabulous stories circulating into the conversation ecosystem. That should change the culture, right?

Well, how do you do that?

• Email – employees press delete in their inbox more often than their heart beats
• Newsletters – are they even read or made anymore?
• Intranet – possibly
• Water-cooler – possibly

Obviously the aforementioned possibilities are not exactly Enterprise 2.0 party crashers.

Steve Dale also wrote that storytelling is invaluable when it comes to knowledge sharing. To me, knowledge sharing is as “Enterprise 2.0” as it gets these days, so maybe there is a correlation here.

Maybe we need to publicly state that, for once and for all, knowledge is going to be shared across the organization. Knowledge sharing becomes the new ‘company culture’. Silos are to be broken, the training department dismantled (or reconfigured), fiefdoms burned to the ground and then let the sharing begin.

Ok, now what?

If, philosophically at least, knowledge is being shared (be it content, documents, videos, learning, skills, expertise, whatever), and storytelling becomes part of the equation to help drive a culture change, an Enterprise 2.0 platform and tool-set have to be made available … at the same time … to achieve the equally stated mission of a culture change.

Maybe, in the year 2010, to get to a connected, collaborative and communicative culture that is rife with sharing as an invaluable operating principle to the success of an organization, we need to introduce both a culture change and Enterprise 2.0 to the masses.

• Storytelling = Knowledge Sharing = Enterprise 2.0 = Culture Change

Having thought about this for several months now, I believe Enterprise 2.0 and Culture Adaptation must go hand in hand down the organizational change alter. It’s the right thing to do in today’s society.

Comments (13)

By Dan Pontefract, 10/24/2009 6:44 PM

This past week, I attended the SharePoint 2009conference in Las Vegas. I’ll provide some feedback on that particular release in another blog posting (read Bill Simser for now) but what the conference itself got me thinking about was that, thankfully, the standalone LMS is definitely going to become redundant. Dinosaur. Soviet Union. Saturn Car. Hierarchy. (you get the picture)

Those organizations (and frankly public learning institutions) that are clinging to their standalone learning management systems as a way in which to serve up formal ILT course schedules and eLearning are absolutely missing the big picture. Sadly, there are too many organizations like this out there.

The LMS should no longer be thought of as a destination for the learner. This is the nuclear fault of the LMS itself and of antiquated thinking from our learning leaders; it encourages standalone learning by driving people to register for an event … be it an ILT class or an eLearning module.

Sure, clever instructors, faculty and learning administration management/leadership teams may find unique, albeit independent, ways in which to embed some form of informal and/or social learning before as well as after the event, but this is merely triage as opposed to a lobotomy.

When you hear people say ‘we need Facebook for the organization’ … I don’t think that’s exactly what they mean. Jon Husband does a good job of illustrating this over here.

Facebook for the organization implies three things:

• A development platform that serves up formal, informal and social content & connection for all
• A single ‘window into the org’ versus many separate applications and systems (I wrote about this here)
• Learning happens naturally, by osmosis, and without care for how it happens

The LMS insinuates the notion that you ‘go to training’. This is asinine in today’s world.

If you want to change the culture (as Will Kelly describes here) it’s surely not just about the technology. But … to change the culture, you also need to drive an organization to believe that training does not only happen in an event (ILT and eLearning) and thus, by keeping the standalone LMS alive and kicking, you exacerbate the issue.

Employees need to constantly connect, they need to constantly share, and they need to learn from one another. This cannot happen solely in an ILT class and it surely does not happen in an eLearning module.

Set up your ‘Facebook for the organization’ by embedding an LMS (or LMS like features) into your enterprise-wide collaboration platform. Coaches, mentors, online buddies need to coexist within the wiki’s, blogs, discussion forums, webcam meetings, online presence, etc. which needs to coexist within the list of formal classroom and eLearning offerings which needs to coexist with your documents, knowledge management, videos, podcasts, which needs to coexist with the profiles, skills, and recent activity-feed happenings of all employees.

Blow up your LMS. Find a way to integrate it into your collaboration platform.

This is where the future is taking us.

Oh, and I don’t think Google Wave is the reason to get rid of your LMS as Michael Feldstein describes. But I like what he does have to say about the LMOS for academic institutions.

Comments (3)

By Dan Pontefract, 10/14/2009 7:52 PM

That crazy cat Luis Suarez over at elsua.net (who I really respect) got me thinking with a recent post entitled “The KM and Social Computing Culture Changes“.

In it he states:

I am sure that you would agree with me that it’s very rare to find some common ground between traditional Knowledge Management and Social Computing. Yet, to be honest, they are both the same! They are both trying to help improve the overall productivity of knowledge workers.

As knowledge and social computing collide (because they are both the same), so too can be said of learning/training/education as well as communication and for that matter, content in general.

Corporations are shifting; formal, informal and social learning is replacing top-down classroom only models. Knowledge, content and the like is not only coming from external industry experts – it comes from user generated (or employee generated) sources.

So, I’ll extend Luis’ argument by including all forms of learning, all forms of communication, and all forms of content.

They are all the same! (and I also wonder if Kevin Jones <who I also respect> might have changed his mind 18 months after this particular post)

What has this got to do with a grocery store?

Imagine content, whether it’s via Knowledge Management, or the ‘old’ training department, or corporate communications, or via document management repositories, or <insert your source> were considered food. You have a shopping cart full of food that you have grown in your own backyard or home, and because you are so altruistic, you are bringing that shopping basket full of food into the store to share with others.

There, you decide to place your food in various but pre-determined sections like the dairy, bakery, pasta, cereal, etc.

You’re conscious of choice and need to eat, so you help yourself to the food of others that has already been placed in the various sections.

It’s a utopian state of food; if we substitute food for content … this same mechanism can be applied in an organization, no matter the size.

If a company can create the right structure within the grocery store, so that the food doesn’t go bad, it doesn’t slide off the shelves, it’s properly tagged & priced, and ultimately it’s both a consumption and contribution model … everybody wins. As I’ve written about before, I think there are all sorts of new roles to play as well.

Shouldn’t this be the new moonshot for an organization?

Shouldn’t this moonshot include all forms of content, and serve it up whether it’s formal, informal or social in nature?