Organizations are looking for the bulletproof collaboration strategy.  I often hear, “How are you going to do XXXX?”  I might reply that “my plan is to do YYYY, but if it doesn’t work we will try something else”.  The reaction takes people off guard because they think there is a right way to do all this social stuff.  It is not that I don’t know what I am doing.

It is not that I am incompetent and guessing what we should do.  Rather we have to remember that Enterprise 2.0 environments are not build on software (which is possible to implement perfectly) but rather they are based on people who are fickle and not altogether stable.

Their likes and dislikes change, they are moody and they have strokes of insights that can change everything in the matter of one day.  Yet too many times –  especially if the Enterprise 2.0 project is headed by I.T. – they want it done right.  (This leads me to my next blog post on opposites, coming soon.)

Remember this:  There isn’t a perfect “right way”. And what might be right today may be wrong tomorrow.  What is right for my organization may be very wrong for yours.  The way to develop a collaborative strategy is tailor it to your org and run with it.  But then be flexible enough to change – this is all very iterative.

Because this is about people you must be willing to change.  DO NOT treat this like an IT project.  Treat it like a people project.  In fact, it is not a project at all.  It just is.  It is woven into the way we work.  It is about sharing, collaboration and openness which don’t need a project to work well.  This is a difficult concept to help key stakeholders understand – but help them understand we must.

Iterate.  Try, fail, succeed, share. (In fact, as Bart Schutte points out, there is also a bit of luck to it.)

There aren’t any steps. I’ve never really liked “STEPS” lists, because they are too generic (unless you are putting together the Space Shuttle, or something like that).  It is as if they will take you to the holy grail.

Steps imply that they must be done in order – in sequence.  Yet each community is in its own phase.  They have their own unique strengths & weaknesses & culture.  There isn’t a One-Size-Fits-All method.  It is impossible to come up with a list of steps that will cover them all.

Instead, here are 10 things you must do (or not do) when creating a community.

1. DO gather (virtually or in person) the community together (or a portion of it) and look at it from a performance improvement perspective.  You can’t go in thinking that an online community will solve all of its problems.  How much better to be able to go in, recognize an area that can be improved, and then be able to provide a solution, whatever that may be!  If not provide it, then recognize what a potential solution could be and who to contact.  It could be training, process re-engineering, dealing with cultural issues…
2. Don’t just target the GenY or Millenials.  Those who are older get this just as much as they do.
3. Don’t ask them to blog, or tweet, or use a wiki.  They won’t know what to do with it.  Well then, how do we help them use these new tools?
4. Work the tools into their workflow.  If it is an extra chore, they won’t use it (this seems pretty intuitive, but is forgotten in practice).  Make it a part of how they work.  But don’t focus on the tools either…
5. Focus on the people, the culture.  Usage of the tools will follow.  Help the people “work out loud.”
6. Don’t create communities hoping they will join.  Make sure you have a plan! (Again, that seems obvious, but…)  Throwing something out there will rarely work.  Be strategic, yet flexible enough to allow the employees to set the agenda.
7. Do set the example yourself.  Use it.  Show others how it can be used in the real world.  At NASA we are in the middle of development of our enterprise social solution.  How do we communicate?  Using the tool and principles of transparency.  I can’t tell you how effective that has been in showing others the value and how to use it practically.  Oh, and I have avoided a ton of meetings and emails as well.
8. Do dare to be different.  Don’t go with the flow which will only lead you back to the same results the organization has always achieved.  You MUST go against the grain – not to be combative, however.  But when people challenge you, stand up with them (not ‘to’ them) and help educate them, allthewhile having a smile on your face.  Some will laugh at you and that is okay.  Just smile, knowing that they will come back later and use the very thing they mocked.
9. DO focus on TRUST.  I can’t stress this enough.  Talk about it in your meetings, online, on the phone, all the time.
10. Help others understand the difference between personal and professional uses – internal and external uses.  They are very different (although they can bleed into each other, but keep it simple with them for right now).  Beat that drum loud and hard.

Yesterday I was in a meeting where the point was yet again hit home and solidified that much more in my brain: Build up the Enterprise 2.0 framework for your company (rather, start and continue, not that we are ever done).  Give your company the baseline capabilities in whatever form that may be which works for them.

Then – and here is the most important part – when helping facilitate the creation of the more purposeful communities, DO NOT approach it as if you are building a virtual community. Go in as a performance technologist, with all the same tools, plus this one.  Find out what they need and how you can help them.  If E2.0 can help them (and much of the time it can), then use it.  But don’t limit your discovery to only E2.0 tools.  If they need help and other solutions would be more appropriate as specific interventions, make sure you bake that in and make this a whole package, with E2.0 as one of the ingredients.

Trainers sometimes make this mistake.  To some, because they are in the training business, everything can be solved by an eLearning module, or an ILT (instructor led training), or a good seminar.  My point: This is a common trap – one I fear we ignore when it comes to E.20.

Help an org build up their business holistically rather than focus on one solution.

At the NASA IT Summit a few weeks ago, the famed Nick Skytland of NASA gave a really good session on the use of new technology by the “Digital Natives” and Millenials (those who grew up using this new technology).  He talked about how those entering the work force were different because they didn’t need to struggle to understand the technology as opposed to Baby Boomers to whom this technology is new (speaking in general terms).  And a year ago and more I would have agreed. I don’t any more.  Coincidentally, it was about a year ago that he last gave this session in another conference.

Afterward the session, Bernadette Buzzell, who I work with, aptly pointed out to he and I that the Baby Boomers were getting it – case in point: herself.  There are plenty of people who didn’t grow up with the technology who are embracing it.  And we both agreed with her.  The divide is becoming less and less by age as it is strictly by adoption.

And in thinking about it, when I started speaking at conferences there was not any mention of the differences. Then, it became a hot topic.  Now that is fading away.  All in the span of only a few years.  It is interesting to see the shift happen so quickly.

This goes back to my study a few years ago when this notion of the generational divide was starting.  I did some ethnographic research on Enterprise 2.0 adoption for a class I was taking and I was surprised to find that adoption didn’t work by age (which is what I was told).  And now we are finding this more and more.

The other day I was speaking to a group of trainers and there was someone in there who was over 70.  Her comment was along the lines of, “I will never use this stuff. It is for you young’ns.”  She was a good natured lady that I knew I could joke with so I said, “That’s not true!  You sure will use it!  Look at you.  Right now you are checking your Blackberry.  You are already ahead of the main body of folks who don’t have one and don’t know how to use one.   You are glued to that device.  If you can figure that out, this will be a piece of cake.”

Adoption has to do with context, not age.

Can you ever imagine these situations in a business setting?

By by D'Arcy Norman on Flickr

• Billy grabs a pen and paper and starts writing, “Hi. I am writing this note because I was told I should.  I am not sure who I am writing to or why I am writing, I just am.”
• Jane picks up the phone and dials a random number, “Hi. I am calling you because I was told I should use this thing.  I am not sure who you are or why I am calling, I just am.”
• You get an email invite to the meeting entitled, “A meeting.”  In the body it says, “Hi. Please come to this meeting that I was told to have.  I am not sure why we are having it or why you are invited.  But we need to have a meeting.”

You would never see that. Why?  Because the pen and paper, a phone and meetings are not end results.  They are tools used when there is a purpose and it makes sense to use them.

Do we ever think, “I am going to use the phone,” without following that up with, “to talk with…”

Why, then, do we feel we need to use a blog or a wiki or a discussion group?  Why do we feel others should use them?  To often we say, “You should write your blog,” Or “You should try a wiki.”  But using these tools won’t lead to any positive outcome unless we have a reason to use them.

This is why it is so important to make sure these potentially powerful tools are used correctly and for the right purposes.  We need to weave them in the way we work.

Don’t write a blog post. Instead, share with everyone where you are on your project.

Don’t create a wiki page. Instead, collaborate more efficiently.

Don’t create a discussion. Instead, ask a diverse set people for an answer to a tough question and have a conversation.

Don’t tweet. Instead, share your insights and links.

Social = People.  Enough said.

Remember a time you were at a gathering – a child’s soccer game, a party, a dinner with friends, your neighborhood watch meeting.  Your conversation was mostly, if not all, casual.  There wasn’t an agenda – you talked about what came to mind.  Often those topics center in your similarities.

How many times did you turn to ways you might be able to help each other? Or collaborate on a project? Or give someone the name of someone else who they may be able to do business with? Or learned a new way to…? Or shared information which the other person was not aware of?  Or started a relationship with who would be a life-long friend?

Welcome to microblogging at your business.  It is the conversation starter that leads to greater things.  If you only jump into the heavy topics you miss the serendipitous interactions that pay big dividends.  Encourage the small talk – For by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.

Feb 1-3 I will be presenting at the Training 2010 conference with Dave Wilkins (@dwilkinsnh). In preparation, we came up with a bunch of things that one would need to know when creating a social learning strategy.  Each one could take a deep dive, but we wanted to make the list available.

We hope this will help to spark some imagination and help you see, as you plan and implement, some areas you may have missed. (Here is the list in document form.  This work is under the Creative Commons Share Alike license.)

Please feel free to add to the list in the comments below.

Checklist of Social Learning Strategies

Cultural Issues Related to Social Learning
What do you want it to be?  What is it today?

• Openness vs. planning?  Where is your balance point?
• Autonomy and self-direction vs. top-down mandates?  Where is your balance point?
• What do executives, key stakeholders and “rank-and-file” think about social media and sharing?
• What are your organizational attitudes about transparency?
• To what extent do learners take personal responsibility and accountability for their learning?

Social Learning Approaches and Methods
What “kind” of  Social Learning models are you pursuing?  How do they integrate?

• Codified?
• Collaborative?
• Emergent?
• What kinds of social learning interventions do you need?
• Do you need focused Communities of Practice or decentralized social learning that is part of all learning experiences?  Or both?
• Will you pursue a federated model and use best-of-breed from multiple provides with a single or multiple aggregation points?
• Will you use a unified suite that offers core social media applications, such as SharePoint or Jive?
• How will your social media elements interact with your Learning Management System?
• If “social learning” happens outside the LMS, what will happen where?
• If “social learning” happens outside the LMS, how will you see a unified view of learner activity?
• Where will you keep the “profile” of record to avoid having multiple learner profiles across multiple systems?
• If you use a federated approach or multiple systems in any way, how will ensure that learners can discover people through content, content through people, content through content, and people through people across your systems?
• If you use a federated approach or multiple systems, how will you search?
• If you use a federated approach or multiple systems, how will develop recommendation, reward, and recognition strategies?
• If you use a suite approach, how will you address gaps – missing wiki, missing microblog etc…?

Social Learning Planning
Who owns what?  How will get from point A to point B?  How will you mitigate risk?

• What kinds of social media are already being used in the organization?
• For what purpose?
• Who owns them?
• What kinds of learning communities do you want to help along through hands-on nurturing?
• What kinds of learning communities do you want to more proactively manage and plan?
• What are the problems you are trying to solve?
• Who is your target member for your community?
• What are the problems your community members are trying to solve?
• If the problems are solved, what does success look like?
• If the problems are solved, what is the impact of success?
• What is your Social Learning Policy?
• What is your plan when these policies are breached?
• What is in your Miss Manners Guide to Social Learning?
• Who is on your Social Learning Governance Board – IT, Legal, CLO etc…?
• How will social learning activities factor into key performance indicators and performance reviews?
• What does IT own?  Some suggestions:  security issues, archiving, technical issues, deployment, options, aggregation, report consolidation, integration fulfillment, report fulfillment.
• What does Learning own?  Some suggestions:  strategy, cultural readiness, “tools” training, moderation, member management, community management, programming, integration requirements, reporting fulfillment with built-in reporting tools.
• What does Legal and Compliance own?  Some suggestions:  archival strategy, social media storage requirements, approval strategies for sensitive content (which might be all content), member management and “flagging” policies, reporting requirements for all of the above.
• Who will support your organization’s use of social media?  Technical support?  IT?  Learning?
• What is your start point in terms of participants and technologies?
• What is the long-term rollout plan?  What social media tools will be turned on when?  When you do turn on new functionality, what is the trigger – time, membership, activity?
• Will you organize content topically, hierarchically by division, unit etc…, or by functional area?
• What is your launch strategy to drive participation? (more below)
• What is your moderation strategy?
• What is your reporting strategy?
• Who will own your programming schedule?
• How will you identify champions and key influencers prior to roll-out and on an on-going basis?
• Who will be responsible for defining content categories and the overall ontology of your social learning content?
• What is end of life or end game for your learning community?  Does the community evolve into something else?  Is it archived?  Is there a planned obsolescence because it’s a one-off in response to external factors what will change?

Social Learning Launch Activities
How will you quickly achieve critical mass?  How will you sustain and grow the initiative over time?

• What other corporate initiative(s) is the launch point tied to?
• How will you drive traffic and participation in the “early days”?  Some suggestions:  competitions, rewards, “forcing” through changed process, well-planned programming schedules, middle management expectations, senior level management modeling, social media events – wiki barn raising, live chats, team video jams etc…
• Who will be responsible for enforcing your policy and procedure changes?  For example, if learners are not supposed to answer questions of each other via email, but through the wiki or an FAQ discussion board, who will be responsible for enforcing the change?
• Who will be responsible for “seeding” content before go-live?
• Who will communicate the launch?
• How will you ensure that learners have the necessary skills and tools to participate in the conversation and sharing?  Things to consider:  training on the social media tools, training on social media concepts, lots of early recognition and praise.

Social Learning Technical, Legal, Compliance Issues
How will this effort fit into existing corporate governance strategies?

• What is your security plan to prevent unauthorized viewing of sensitive data?
• What is your data recovery plan in the event of corruption, server failure etc…?
• What is your plan to communicate the security so that users can help safeguard sensitive content while feeling secure enough to freely share within the defined parameters of the site?
• What is your records retention policy?
• What is your content permissions policy?
• Do you need a “contact” permission policy to prevent your SME’s or other experts from being overwhelmed?
• Do you have a “Do not discuss via Social Media” list?  What is it and how will it be communicated?
• What kinds of topics require “pre-approval” before posting live to the site?
• What kinds of topics must include “report violation” options after they go live?
• Do you have a list of keywords that should be redacted or replaced?
• Do you have a keyword list that should trigger notification to SMEs, Legal or Compliance personnel?
• What is your reaction plan to a breach of policy?  Who owns it?  Who enforces it?

Social Learning Communities in the Extended Enterprise
Planning for community members who are “outside” the company walls…

• If you have external audiences, suppliers, partners, clients, etc… in addition to internal audiences, what is your plan for all of the above for your external audiences?
• What is your strategy for leveraging public social media channels?
• Is the Learning group the lead or is Marketing, Customer Support, Product Management, etc…?
• How will your social learning strategies compliment your marketing, customer support, product, etc… strategies?
• How will you leverage content between various constituents?
• Do you need to have “blended” areas where clients, employees, suppliers etc… co-mingle in a shared space with access to shared content?
• What role do your external members play in community management, programming or moderation?

Social Learning Community Management
How will you manage and grow your community over time?

• Who will be in charge of community management?
• What is your moderation strategy?
• Who is responsible for moderation?
• How many months in advance will you publish your programming schedule?
• How will you reward and recognize key contributors in ways that increase internal motivation?
• What sort of member management policies do you need?
• Who enforces member management?
• What role will senior leaders play in contributing to the learning community?
• How will you market your successes and the growing value of the content?
• How will you promote new content, new members, new groups, and new topics?

Social Learning Professional Development, Skills, Competencies
What kinds of skills and competencies do you need to develop as a learning professional?

• Become a Social Media tools maven – wiki, video, podcast, blogging, microblogging, etc…
• Understand key concepts of Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Understand key concepts related to Team Building and Team Dynamics
• Understand key concepts in Social Psychology
• Understand key issues of self-efficacy as it relates to social media: trust, belonging, self-confidence, self-direction, motivation, skills
• Knowledge of moderation strategies and key moderation concepts like seeding, facilitating, autonomy, respect, and flow
• Knowledge of key community management strategies including programming, reward and recognition models, advertising and awareness campaigns, member management
• Ongoing professional development by networking outside the company through social learning

I have noticed two overarching thoughts in those that ask for E2.0 in their organization / community:

1) They know what they want, but are not exactly sure WHY they want it.   They say “we want a blog” but when asked why, they can’t quite articulate that.  Sure, they may say  that “we want to get information out” but they are not clear on to whom this information will go, or what the information will be or who will write it or how it is different than the purpose of an email.

2) They want to use different tools but not change the way they do things.  This is like doing dishes by hand, buying a dishwasher and then still doing them by hand before putting them in the dishwasher.

There WILL be trade offs.  One of the major trade offs is that E2.0 is participatory.  This leaves the option to participate in their hands, not yours.  Organizations too often try to force participation (or in a certain way) and what do they get? Either half-hearted participation or the illusion of participation.

Instead, allow them to participate where and when they feel it will be of most benefit.  They will feel empowered and trusted and will be MUCH more effective.