There are five factors to asking the right questions to create a great discussion in a group.  They are so critical, yet so overlooked.

First of all, many of us talk when we should be listening.  I think we can all agree on that one.  Second of all, we need to be asking questions.  But the RIGHT questions are essential. Not only the CONTENT of the question, but the DIRECTION of the question.

There was a TV show or movie some time ago I remember seeing.  A lawyer said, “Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.”  For some reason that has stuck with me.  That may be right for lawyers, but not for non-legal folk like you and I.  Yet still, there is a hint of truth there.   Sometimes we need to at least have a clue of where the answer will go.  Other times, it should be wide open.  It depends on your purpose and your audience.

Purpose is factor #1.  This post focuses on starting a wide-open discussion.  Audience, or forum, is factor #2.  This is important for the content of the question.

Lately I have come across a number of incidences where a group wants to have a healthy discussion, but lack focus in their questions.  Last month I helped launch “ExplorNet” –   NASA’s MSFC’s internal social network.  One group implemented a QOTW (Question of the Week).  The first question was great.  60 or so responses.  The next question received about 3 responses.  What was the difference?

The first question had three additional factors or characteristics:

1. The answer came the the reader’s mind as soon as they read the question.
2. It was easy to answer.  They didn’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to articulate their thoughts.
3. It hit an emotional nerve.

Bingo.  Question #1 was a hit.  But Question #2 was different.  It was a great question, but didn’t fulfill all three requirements.  The answer came to the reader’s mind easily, but it was difficult to articulate, plus it only had a moderate to low emotional nerve factor.

This pattern also became obvious to me when I co-ran the Social Learning QOTD (day) on Twitter (which later turned into the E2.0 QOTD).  All the questions were good, but the answers didn’t have all of the above elements.

Next time you want to get ideas, think of your purpose, your audience and these three guidelines.

photo credit: Lazurite

Here is another ‘ah-ha’ moment for me.  Again, it was something that I always knew, but the importance of it became even more glaringly obvious.

I was reading a ReadWriteWeb post from back in September on Personalization.  To make their point, they quote Ken Fromm as saying,

“The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.”

Much of our focus is on sharing data.  To do that we want to create web pages and portals – the vehicles of web information. But that is seen from the creator side of the pond.  Look at the consumer side: I want information to come to me. And only on topics I find interesting. I want to follow the streams of interesting people and learn from them. I want to share information that I find useful. And I want it in one place, if possible.  But if not, I want to control where they come to and what it looks like. (Notice the number of ‘I’s.)

We all know about RSS, about Twitter and FriendFeed applications that pull in streams of information.  None of this is new. What is new is that we, as providers, need to focus on that instead of how to get the information out there.  Personally, I care only this much about where it is and in what form.  As long as I can a) quickly find it or the experts,  b) have it ‘delivered’ to me in the way I want to see it and c) be able to collaborate on it, I don’t care where it originated.  It could come from X and as long as I can collaborate on it in Y, that is fine with me (but let me define Y).

So the focus is even less on the site (how to share the information) and much more on enabling those in an organization to create their own personalized way of receiving shared information. Yet it is SO easy to fall in the trap.

Yet, the main problem is that most people are accustomed to the ‘web site’ mentality and will default to that to get and share information.  Our job is to first provide a way for them to personalize information transactions and second, to help them understand that the personalization they want is there and how to use it to their advantage.

The response from my AH-HA! moment in the last post was amazing. I hope others benefited from it.

In the comments, ‘Wilson’ had some insights:

“…I don’t think this will help convince (nor should it, IMHO) a CxO or mid-level manager to embrace a social network platform. I still see the chasm of understanding re “enterprise 2.0″ tools very much represented in managerial statements such as “Of course we value and encourage collaboration and knowledge share, but that Facebook kind of stuff isn’t the way to do it.”

I agree with you 100%.  It will take much more than this.  And what will convince them to embrace it? DON’T TALK ABOUT THE PLATFORM – or the tools or the shiny new toys, or compare it to Facebook or Twitter or anything else.  Talk to them about the pain they are seeing now and how it can be overcome.  Tell them the story.  Get them to buy in emotionally and intellectually.  Buying in logistically will happen naturally as an effect.

EXAMPLE:

1) A CxO knows that the regular reports created every week are not read by most people, including those it targets.  It is a waste of time and effort, yet tradition and the culture says that the reports must be created – and so they are.  But clearly, some information in the report is worthy to some people.  Show this CxO that by opening up the communication, we can let people target the information they need.  And, if there is any question about the information, they can go directly to the person and ask for clarification.  The ‘report’ becomes a gateway to more understanding through interaction with the people instead of the end product itself.

2) In a recent “Social Media / Networking 101″ class I did recently, I told them that I asked a question on Twitter and received back a quick response.  Some didn’t understand why I used Twitter to ask a question instead of using Google.  “It would have been faster”, they claimed.  “For some things, I am sure,” I answered.  “But the question I had was about something so new that the answer would never have been found online.  It would only have been found in people’s heads.”  For them, there was a big Ah-Ha! there.  I could see in their eyes the lights turn on.  In fact, I received an email the next day from someone who attended with his own Ah-Ha!:

When I do a regular internet search, I’m either added or doomed by my choice of words for the very rule-based machine search that ensues.  In Twitter, I benefit from the interpretive skills of fellow human brains that read and interpret my need and thus are able to better design a relevant response.

Bingo.  What sold him was NOT Twitter, but what can be accomplished with it and how it can help him now.

That should be our focus: the WHYs and the HOWs (as I have written before).  The WHATs come later, naturally.

Traditional business works like a process.  A process because things need to be the same.  Because of a lack of trust.  Because of a higher degree of confidence in the ‘correct’ outcome.

Using  social media and networking is like a light.  It spreads and illuminates that which it is focused on and all objects around it.  The spread breathes life into new forms of learning and growing and being and connecting.

When I think of process, I think of head-down, go and do.  When I think of light in this context, I think of head up, open and ready to discover.

Now, try to take social media & networking & learning and put it in a process form.  Contradictions, eh?  True.  Do they both have strengths?  Yes.  Can they work together?  Sure.  But when you try to dictate that which is inherently open through a rigid process, you kill the outcome.  All you have is what you would have had had you followed the process only.

It is time think differently.  Radically differently.  Then, take the strengths of everything you have experienced and combine them together.  But don’t try to do new things with the same mind set as yesterday.

Someday you might run up against this argument:

“Why can we just quickly throw together an online community and let it go?  In fact, we have a number of communities that we could do that with right now.”

There are so many behavior-based problems with this I can’t see straight.  But imagine that the person was in I.T.  (Broad generalization…) They don’t care about the behavior of the community, they focus on the tools.

“Seriously?  You want to take how much time to throw up communities when I can grab my web guy and he can have something up tomorrow?”

So, what do you say?  My answer: “We have not built the framework to sustain interconnected communities.”  And here are some characteristics to back you up.  These are my five arguments for community unification.
One Person:Many Communities.
I, being one person, live in many communities.  And I am not talking virtually but in real life.  I am a part of communities defined as family, church, Boy Scouts, Jim Band Music, student, home owners association, and the list goes on and on.  You, no doubt, live a similar life.  But I am one person.  In a virtual world within an organization I MUST be able to have one identity that is a part of these different communities.

Think about it.  Try being a different person in each community.  It doesn’t and won’t work in real life or virtually.  (This makes me think about the guys who have multiple wives in different cities and none of them know each other, until one day…)

The framework must allow for interconnected communities.
My family is also a part of my church community.  There are some in the church community that are a part of the Boy Scouts community, and others a part of the Jim Band community.  Those in my student community are also a part of my professional communities.  They all interconnect.  If you can’t do that online, you are limiting the strength of each individual community.

The nature of the ‘world’ is the same.
We live in one world.  The laws of nature don’t change.  In each community the dynamics, characteristics and rules will change because there are different people.  But we all breathe, we all communicate, the ground we all stand on is the same ground and it will rain and shine on us all.  Those are constant.

In the virtual world, there must be consistency.  Characteristics must be allowed to differ, but there must be some things that are the same – the same rules of nature online must apply across the board.  We can’t expect to have different processes, different fundamental layouts, differently acting capabilities for the same function.  Give the users something they can expect.  This way, when they go from one community to another, they know the basic laws by which it is governed and they are the same as they community they just came from.

Discover information wherever it lives.
With disconnected communities, you can’t take advantage of intersections where communities cross.

A coworker of mine recently told me a story that really proved this point well.  She was training her dog using cones for it to weave in and out of (it sounds like it is a show dog, but I know very little about dogs even though I have one).  There were two rows and the cones alternated on each side as they progressed down the line.  To help the dog become more agile, she, in time, brought the two rows closer and closer together until they formed one line.  As this happened, the dog became much better at weaving through the cones.

This coworker also is an assistant soccer coach.  They also had a drill with two lines of cones where the players would weave in and out.  Then the two worlds naturally collided and she started bringing the lines closer together.  The players  gradually performed better.  She shared this technique from her dog training ‘community’ with her soccer ‘community’ and the other coaches started doing the same thing.  It was just natural.

In this case, the information lived on one community and was transfered to another.  Disconnected communities cannot take advantage of this effect, at least with any degree of efficiency.

Permissions for each person must be unified.
I tried to find a great real life community example, but the perfect one escaped me.  So I am going to just come out and say it: We must be able to manage permissions for all communities in one place.  Imagine trying to say, “Joe can see this community, but not this one, and in this one he can view it and make comments but not create and in this one he can only view” and managing that though 4 different community management tools.  Ain’t gonna happen without an excess of resources.  But if it was in one place it is certainly manageable.

These are my five rules of community unification.  If you have any more, let your voice be heard.

Having a ‘real’ job helps you to define yourself.  You might be a graphic designer, a chemical engineer, a nurse or gardner.  But when you are a consultant, the question “Who are you” is largely up to you to define.  This is the challenging (yet exciting!) situation I have placed myself in. Doing this for one main, steady company and doing other projects on the side (which is what I have been doing for years) is MUCH different than all contracting and consulting.  What a fun time it has been so far!

When I talk to either one person or a large hall of people about what I do, I get so excited!  The possibilities for them are HUGE!  Most people, because they don’t understand all this, do not realize the impact and savings of time, money and other resources that they would see.  And when they finally take the plunge it is wonderful to see their eyes light up and get just as excited as I am.  It is even better when they experience, first hand, the effects and become a hero in their organizations.  Maybe that is what I do – I create heros.  Hmmm.  I need to think about that more!

Selling myself, however, has never been my strongest attribute.  I just want to get in, do a great job and show them how to make some real gains.  My ‘proof in the pudding’ is my work, not a hyped up sense of self.  BUT, I do realize that to be able to be a part of those projects I have to so some selling.  So I have taken a stab at defining myself in a more generic way.  I have decided to do it as a post instead of in a doc that I horde myself.  Feel free to make any comments.

Where is my focus?

Primary focus: Using social media and social networking for performance improvement and customer communication.

Secondary Focus: Using social media for marketing; creating performance improvement solutions including learning environments and curriculum; creating and delivering the training (standup, eLearning, etc.).

What does the Primary Focus look like?

• Education on how social media / networking can drastically increase performance improvement and customer communications through keynotes, conference sessions, workshops, webinars, trainings, writings
• Setting strategy – Working with key stakeholders to identify
  • Goals / objectives
  • Resources
  • Culture which will help or hinder project
  • Roles & responsibilities
  • Skills and abilities of employees
  • Current vs. future processes / procedures
  • Timelines, milestones, tasks and measurements of success
• Implementation
  • Managing the project
  • Creating the environment culturally
  • Creating the environment technically
  • Educating all involved on all levels
  • Marketing (internally & externally)
• Ongoing management and support

How have businesses benefited from this?

• Increase in
  • sales
  • time to ‘onboard’ a new employee
  • innovation and idea creation
  • the customer ‘working’ for the company for free
  • finding and exploiting new and untapped markets and industry potential
  • finding necessary information
  • finding the experts in a given subject
  • communication with and between employees
  • communication with customers
  • finding answers to questions
  • brining out and storing the knowledge and wisdom of employees and customers
  • working and more efficient processes
  • focus on direction for employees and customers
  • customers supporting themselves and each other
  • customer feedback
  • effectiveness of training
• Decrease in
  • customer support instances and time/instance
  • number of meetings and meeting time
  • number of emails
  • redundant tasks (duplication of efforts)

Current Side Projects

• Director of the Social Learning Special Interest Group for ASTD’s Cascadia chapter
• Co-Host of the  Social Learning Strategies and Trends Podcast (iTunes link)
• Creator & co-administrator of the Social Learning Question of the Day on Twitter (@slqotd)
• Finishing a master’s of Instructional & Performance Technology from Boise State Universtiy with a thesis on using social media / networking as an EPSS (Electronic Performance Support System)

I am pretty blessed to work with some pretty smart people.  Those in the industries of social media, search engine optimization and marketing (SEO / SEM), Learning and eLearning  and hardware & software.

So, that is who I am – my self reflection.

This morning during our weekly recording of the Social Learning Strategies and Trends Podcast (also available on iTunes), Dave and I were gabbing about designing learning – not just training.  And he asked the question (certainly not verbatim), “Are trainers the chef or the waiter?”  I loved this!

By Jim O'Connell on Flickr

By PhotoAn.l on Flickr

Now, don’t get me wrong.  We need BOTH Chefs and Waiters.  But if there are not any true performance chefs at an organization and there are only waiters, or the the wrong people are performance chefs, the outcome will leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

And we all know what that tastes like.

****

I don’t know who to credit this to, but I love it. It has been posted so many times that the originator is lost. But, THANK YOU! to whomever it was.  (UPDATE: It is from Nasa.  Thanks, Harold!)

What I love about this is that it is simple & direct. This got me thinking… Why don’t we have more of these? So I decided to create some more. And here they are…

Blog Advantages: Two-way Constant Receive feedback Searchable Archived Interactive Conversational Smaller, faster updates 1: many:many Learning increases

RSS Advantages: Pushed to you Only what has been updated Information > time spent Constant Searchable Archived Personalized content Automatic Learning increases

Social Networking Advantages: Infinitely more resources Easily contact 1000′s of loose connections yet… Very small maintenance time Searchable Learning increases

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday was my first official day (this year) back in the school world.  We were asked to introduce ourselves.  I mentioned that I was first hired on as a Training Manager.

A lot has happened in this time.  My focus has changed dramatically.  My day-to-day concerns are now centered around implementing, maintaining and strategizing around social learning / network / media initiatives with a side plate of formal training.  I am about to give a training this morning on how to hold difficult conversations, but these type of occurrences (where I do the actual training) don’t happen nearly as often.  My team does most of the training.  We still have customer-facing training that we create and deliver.  There is always the development and delivery of internal training.  Yet my strategy is less on the formal and more on the informal.

With all the talk of social learning, web2.0 and informal communication and learning, we cannot neglect the personal touch as well.  Social learning does not only mean Web2.0, but it means any learning that has a number of characteristics (which I will be blogging about next).

A couple days ago I spoke to Christine Martell who mentioned an instance (and I don’t exactly remember what it was about) where she was frustrated by a particular interaction she was having because everything was in short bursts and nothing was getting done.  What she needed was a sit down conversation to learn and communicate and plan.  That may not be totally correct, but my mind took me to this thought:  We can’t be so caught up in the new social learning / network / media that we neglect or minimize those in front of us and the personal relationships we need to make and nurture.  Too often I see others who’s noses are constantly burried in their iPhones or eyes are fixed on the screen when the most important ‘friends’ and relationships are all around them.  We ought not ignore those that are right in front of us.

Instead, there needs to be a balance.  When anything new is introduced we tend to do a balance check and teeter totter back and forth until we find our personal equilibrium.   Mine is not the same as yours is not the same as Joes is not the same as…  But we all know when we are personally out of whack.

But when we check ourselves and we achieve the correct balance with the new (insert whatever it is here), what a wonderful thing that is!  Our world is that much more open and full.

Oh, the changes in life, the challenges and opportunities – aren’t they wonderful?!

RELATED INFO:

iPhone and iPod: Learning tool or distraction?

THIS POST asks, “Do you need to be a subject matter expert to run subject-based community?”  If I were to change it slightly, “Do you need to be a trainer or SME to be a Learning Facilitator in the social learning world?”  Then I got thinking, what are the skills of this Learning Facilitator?  How are they different than an instructional designer or a trainer?

Here are some initial thoughts.  A learning facilitator will:

• Connect people together
• Encourage discussion and conversation, while at the same time monitor to make sure that the conversations are appropriate
• Listen to what the community of learners is saying in discussions
• Listen to their suggestions and then adjust accordingly
• Monitor discussions and flag the bad apples to keep it appropriate
• Measure and report out on activity
• Be an internal champion
• Be an advocate for the learner as well as a consult to management
• Have a strong understanding of the language and be able to express him/herself very will in written form – an experienced communicator
• Understand and have a good grasp on the technology used
• Be forward thinking and strategic to recognize other ways to increase the conversation and learning – technically and the good old fashioned way
• Be a fresh perspective from their unique position of ‘listening’ to many different conversations
• Be trusted and continue to build that trust
• Help shape and create ground rules by using the learners
• Be able to create goals and have a clear understanding of what they are and why
• Be a Simplicity Maker – too often things like this can get too technical too fast.  This person will have to keep their mind on the end user and keep things simple
• Engage and personalize
• Have a personality and use it
• Help everyone learn how to use the new technology, why they might (and in some cases should) use it
• Not give up
• Face opposition, take a smack in the face, and keep trucking (later they will come back and kiss you)
• Understand motivation and how people work and why they make decisions
• Know the world of the company or customer, how they work and how to best suite the environment and opportunities to allow for maximum ease of use and adoption

Just some stuff off the top of my head, from experience and gleaning information from other sources (here, here, here).  These part ways with the traditional training role, yet many are very similar.

Can you add to this list?  Which are more important than others, do you think?

UPDATE: This does not need to be just one person.  After thinking about it I think I made this out to be more of one job – which it could be.  This could certainly be many people, however, focused part time on this for a specific learning context.