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4 Reasons Why YOU Dont want to Touch Social Learning with a Barge Pole

So, you recently read Jane Bozarths Social Learning for Trainers and followed it up with a read of Enterprise 2.0 by McAfee and The New Social Learning by Conner and Bingham. Youre excited by the promise of social software for learning. Youre already a Facebook and Twitter junkie and life couldnt be better with vendors announcing "Facebook for the enterprise". Wow! Youre going to be a hot-shot social learning pro, arent you? Errrm... think again. Life as a social learning consultant isnt a bed of roses and while the glamour of the Scobels, Hinchliffes, Ghoshes, Schrecks and others is inviting, youre likely to have a rough road ahead. Behind the glitz and glamour is a tough, painstaking albeit eventually fulfilling job, which you absolutely need to know about. So, before you get charmed into this shiny new world read my little disclaimer - it aint easy!

Its Not Really Facebook for the Enterprise
Ok, ok I know you love Facebook and I know Jane says you could potentially use established tools like Facebook and Twitter for learning. Jane is right, I must say and I personally believe that the most mature social business implementations need to have porous walls. With that said, I have to also note that were just not there yet! And frankly, theres perhaps a middle ground we need whichll just take some time. In the mean time, while you revel in the glory of Facebook, your employers need single sign on, integration with other systems, security, governance, uptime guarantees, content ownership assurances, and what not. Ah! That doesnt seem as cool anymore, does it? If youre heading the social learning route, remember that showing off the success of #lrnchat or the Learning and Skills Group is just the first step.

Youll be a Consultant with No Direct Control Ever heard of organisational politics? Its the bad phrase to describe the tension between innovation, internal systems and organisational structure. Once youve gone ahead and wowed YOUR boss with that demo of #lrnchat or or that matter your own PKM approach powered by social media, you should really have a free rein. Or should you? Well if youre championing the cause of collaborative learning in the enterprise, you cant do it alone. You need to get IT to buy into supporting you. Youll need to get leadership to champion your proposal, and to do that, youll need to champion some of their goals. As it turns out, none of them are your puppets - so getting the organisational machinery to start working in the same direction can mean several emails, presentations, meetings, arguments and consultative discussions. Forget about your role as an instructional designer - youre now only a consultant. You have no direct control. Hell, you cant even control behaviours for your learners. At least in the classroom you could set a few rules for participation. Now you need to model their exisiting collaborative behaviours onto your system. Youll often feel that "Click Next to Continue" in elearning or "Lets move to the next exercise." in the classroom gave you more power. Are you happy to live with that for some time?

Its Not the Kool-Aid Youve been Drinking
So, youre happy to rough it out - after all theres the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! I guarantee you, there is one, but its far, far away. Before you can get to the wonderful effects that youve only read about it blogs, youll need to do heaps of hard work. As a start, you may need to create dozens of proofs of concepts for the scores of teams in your organisation. Its not just about getting the executives involved, people are at the center of social business. Be prepared to sit at your desk for hours uploading files, setting up wikis, creating discussion areas and helping people wrap their heads around emergent collaboration. Be prepared to get laughed at and to take the feedback, go back, work and come back more resilient. Even when your community starts to thrive, things wont just happen by magic. Theres a lot of unglamourous work involved in community management, Im afraid. Take a look at what Donald Taylor does for the Learning and Skills Group and what Tom, Dave and Jeanette do for the Articulate community. In fact, with all the content curation, one-on-one support, online facilitation and constant manual gardening that Dave Anderson does, I wonder when he sleeps. Its effective, its useful and it comes from a genuine desire to help people. It may end up being glitzy and glamourous, but dont count on it.

Youve Got To Build Comfort with "Good Enough"
As an elearning pro and even as a trainer, you would have fussed hours, days, weeks and months to get things just right. After all, that slide needs to look polished. That activity needs to be instructionally sound. That elusive goal of perfection keeps you going everyday. Social learning has its own levels of perfection, but that perfection doesnt come from the quality of content. A badly formatted, abrupt, but contextualised answer is good enough for a social QnA environment. Its not pretty, nor is it the most awesome content - its just effective and works. It takes great patience to keep looking at gigabytes of user generated content that may not be as good as what you could have created but is so contextualised, that its far more effective. In social business, perfection comes from being an integral part of the way we work. Perfection is when information flows seamlessly across the internet and the intranet, and people can consume byte-sized content when they want to, where they want to. Its perfection all right, but of a different kind.

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If youve read this far, you probably see my point - being a social learning pro involves a lot of hard work. Its immensely fulfilling; after a while a lot more than just doing instructional design or training. Be prepared however, to take the long, hard road there. Put your heads down, think big, start small and keep iterating. And when you really start to deliver value, which could be sometime away, the accolades may come too. I guess its just a question of being patient. Thats just my two cents - what do you think?

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4 Social Business Lessons I Learnt Last Week

The last week at work was great. Against several odds, we launched our internal social business platform - myThoughtWorks. The uptake until now with just three working days of operation, has been tremendous. Weve seen 1016 documents, 347 social bookmarks, 294 threads and 293 blogposts on the platform from about 524 contributing users. 1310 of our 1700 users are active on the platform and that is a huge win, given our vastly distributed nature. The last few weeks have also been a great learning opportunity for our team and while its easy to surround ourselves with those statistics and feel good about them, the truth is that our journey has only begun. In todays blogpost, I want to share with you some of my musings and our teams collective learnings from the weeks gone by.

Never Overlook Communication
I was chatting with Mark Needham last night. For all his eccentricities, Mark is a very reasonable guy and someone who just gets social media and social learning. Mark however, was one of the people who was taken by surprise with our launch of the new platform. When I spoke to him, he mentioned that while hed gotten the memos, none of them were interesting enough for him to pay any attention. It brought out a very interesting point. The meaning of your communication is in the response you get. If someone as connected as Mark knew nothing about the launch, it meant that we were perhaps not communicating effectively to get his attention. When we were launching MediaWiki in my previous firm, wed faced a similar experience. Corporate communication means nothing if no one receives your message. The success of a social business initiative does depend on effective communication leading up to the launch. This ensures that the key movers and shakers are already warming up to the idea. Shocking high potential users doesnt do much good. If one way doesnt work, try another. In coming weeks were planning several more roadshows, user meetups and other ways to make our communications click.

Understanding User Context is Key to Success
"Communication channels are highways of habit: people have their preferences and they generally stick to them." - Jono Bacon, The Art of Community
Everyone in the enterprise usually wants to contribute to its success. If social business is key to the success of your enterprise most reasonable people will want to jump in. Provided of course, you communicate well enough. This being said, we need to be empathetic towards the slower adopters. Its often not a lack of will to contribute, but the limitation of the performance context that stops people from being gung-ho adopters. Let me give you an example. Our most recent social learning implementation rests on the Google stack. We use Google Sites as a wiki, Google Groups for discussions, Google Chat for chatrooms and Google Videos for media sharing. The heart of the implementation however is Google Groups. For consultants at client site who are often coding at client computers, the easiest way to stay in touch with the rest of the company is email. When you add to that, limited access to ThoughtWorks systems, accessing any other platform becomes a big challenge. Google Groups gets around this problem quite well by providing simple mailing lists for communities. It also helps that a vast majority of western software developers like mailing lists! The move to a social business solution is great for our enterprise if adoption keeps going up as it has in the last three days. Adoption also depends on our empathy and responsiveness for user mindsets and context. In coming days we need to find ways not just to make things like email integration and mobile access seamless for our onsite consultants, but also to ensure that we can build such relationships with our clients that its not taboo to access the enterprise social network while onsite.

Choice is not Always a Great Thing
Every time you provide an option, youre asking the user to make a decision. - Joel Spolsky
Social media has transformed my learning and theres no doubt about that. I do remember though that when I first saw Twitter, I couldnt wrap my head around it. Its quite simple isnt it? Just 140 characters! For some reason I just didnt get it. The process of finding people to follow, setting up a client that works for you, choosing hashtags that matter was just too complicated for me back in the day. Ive struggled similarly with Facebook when it was new. Social media is like that. It becomes powerful when you make the right choices and personalise effectively. Personalisation however, is about making several choices and not everyone is happy to have choice. This is the part of the social business puzzle we need to figure out. While we want most people to make meaningful choices, how can we create useful defaults that the average user can get away with? The shorter the setup time, the easier it is to dive in and participate.

Intuitive is an Overloaded Word
We use the word intuitive way too loosely in design circles. We often debate pointlessly around little things thatll make our interfaces intuitive. This often reminds me of the old BSD bikeshed painting analogy that Sriram Narayanan pointed me to. The fact is that the little things that make a platform intuitive for one are the same things that make it unintuitive for another. Intuition is really a factor of context, experience and familiarity. When my mental model matches the model that an application provides, it seems intuitive. When mental models clash, its unintuitive. The catch with social business implementations is that they are unlikely to be intuitive to users that are unfamiliar with the social paradigm. In fact, I can say that even experienced users of social media who dont use it in a business context are likely to struggle at time. So instead of fussing over how to make the experience intuitive, its crucial that we make the experience learnable. Theres also no substitute to providing people support when they need it. Complaints are good - they are opportunities to connect with users, educate them and build relationships. Nikhil Nulkar, our enterprise community facilitator (a.k.a ninja) is great at doing just this.

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Learning is a continuous process and after going through several social learning initiatives and experiments, Im glad to be implementing a proper social business solution for my employers. Im learning heaps about this stuff, and as time goes on I want to share these insights with you. Id love to hear your thoughts about todays musings so please drop a line in the comments section and tell me.

Im going to be at Learning Solutions 2011 next week, so if youre in the vicinity please come and say hello. Itll be great to catch up.

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