Racquetball is a fast game.  Most of it is played by reflex.  Play it enough, and your reflexes – mind and body – become pretty fast.  I play a couple times a week with a guy who is better than I am.  During a round I will win one game – two if I am lucky – out of five or so.  The last time we played there was a bit of meta cognition.  I recognized that after I made a bad shot I had to quickly learn from it and then forget it because the ball was being served again and it was time to play.

Working with NASA now, I run into the same thing often.  Yesterday I was in a meeting where one person I invited, invited two others.  We sat down and he pointed to the other two and said, “Neither of you are allowed to talk.”  And, true to form, unless he asked them a direct question (only twice), neither of them did speak.  Why?  Because he wanted them not to be too negative and pessamistic toward what I was trying to do which was build an E2.0.

I have been asked many times since I have been here a question similar to, “Have we beat you into submission yet?”  Basically, has the governmental culture beat any hope out of you?

To that I say, Heck No!  Beat me all you want. I feel like Rocky in Rocky 4 where he purposefully took the beating knowing he would come back in the end and win. When others laugh at what I am trying to do I recognize ignorance – they just don’t know what is possible, and I can’t blame them.  Numerous times, like yesterday, I have been told, “Over the last 20 years we have tried something like this many times and each time it failed.”  Those statements don’t phase me.  Times have changed.  You may have tried something LIKE this, but you have not tried THIS, in this culture, at this time, with this technology, under these circumstances.

Never give up. Take the punching and smile. And when it all works in the end, just smile.  NEVER say or act in any way that would exude an “I told you so” attitude.  Just keep going.

Be comfortable being beaten down.  Draw strength from it and keep going.  Let them laugh and snicker all they want.  Then, when it works, invite them to your party and enjoy.

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

Photo credit: db*photography

One of the objections to social media / networking / learning is, “But we will lose control of the content!  They will be able to say anything they want to and that has so many implications.  What about personal information?  Or intellectual information going public?  What will legal say?  What if they say something that is not right?”

Answer #1 is: How do you deal with it now when that happens? It is very much the same.

Answer #2 is: Take control by losing it.

It is true, by giving the people the power to create content within an organization and the venue to widely distribute it, you are losing control over the content to a degree.  So our focus needs to change from controling the content to controlling the outcome.  This is a different mindset.

We have heard so many stories of companies like Dell and Comcast who lost control of the content yet took control of the outcome.  If you are not familiar with these stories, go read them – it is worth it to understand.  A quote from this post:

Customers leave unsolicited positive comments about the products and services they love every day on blogs, review sites and discussion forums. And for the most part, companies are just as silent.

But not Dell. The company launched its Direct2Dell blog in July 2006 to engage directly and publicly with customers about problems. Though the blog had a rocky start, Dell succeeded in showing even its most severe critics that it was both paying attention and acting on customer feedback.

Losing control in one area gives us power in another.

photo credit: Max Z

As has been the case so many times in the past, I talked today with a company which has made THE decision.  You see, in the past if someone needed a wiki, they gave it to them.  If they needed some other internal social technology, they would help out but there wasn’t a strategy.  So many companies dabble in this pre-area, trying to figure out if (and how) internal social media is useful.  Then, when it becomes apparent that it is and that many people want it, they need a strategy – it is a natural evolution.  This is the point this company is at right now.

It is time to jump in with both feet.  But where do you start?  If you have thousands of employees, how do you determine who should use what and in what capacity?

Implementation:

As was mentioned in this meeting, start with the low hanging fruit.  Where are you SURE it will work?  Let them go for it.  From there it will spread – they become your advocates, your case/success studies to the rest of the organization.

Culture:

This is the most difficult part of the whole thing.  Why? Because cultures are made up of people.  People are varied and they can change at any time.  The software is easy because it is there.  It only gets an update every few months at the most and usually it is on a schedule.  People, and groups of people, can change at any time and as frequently as they want.  For this reason, stick to the basics.  Think of this as a change management / performance improvement project, not a social learning project.  Use the same principles to guide you.  Even if you assess the needs of your audience, this does not guarantee that they will use the better solution.  Think ‘habit.’

Some departments will run out of the gate, some will barely crawl, some will reject.  You will need to have a plan for all levels.  Remember this is social media / learning.  Don’t be afraid to be traditionally social and go and talk to them personally.  It may take more time at the beginning, but it goes a LONG way.

Adoption:

Make it easy and natural.  See my series on adoption. Show the benefits.  Evangelize it.  Sell it.

Processes:

Replace, replace replace.  Find what is broken and fix it using social media.  If you don’t replace a process or a mode of communication or some other task, it becomes extra.  Everyone is so busy that anything extra will be put on the back burner and forgotten. If they want to add on extra, let them make that decision when they fully understand the value.  Until then, as Tim O’Reilly said at DevLearn 09, ‘force it’ (with caution).

Use it:

Most of all, if you are not deep into it yourself, it will be VERY difficult to have the type of conversations you will need to have for a favorable outcome.  This is because the objections (and here) they offer will be tough to explain.

Usage:

How will they use it? Why?  Should we let them?  How transparent should be we – and when and with whom?  All good questions which lead to more questions.  What is your system of governance and moderation?  What does ‘acceptable use’ look like?

To really go into this subject would be quite lengthy (thus the disparate subjects) – I apologize for the quick overview.  But if you are at the tipping point this should give you some things to think about.

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

Just wanted to pass these on.  A bunch of success stories (case studies) when implementing social media.  Although not learning centric, they do provide a ground for research and creating your plan.

Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories from 2007

Some 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories – Tell Me More

Objection #3 is one that I don’t hear very often directly. It is usually indirectly, because no one wants to admit it. But they do say it through the questions they ask. “If we let everyone learn from each other, we give up control of that information.”

Answer: Yea & Nay. Let’s start with the Nay.

NAY: There are many ways to keep control of the information. You can watch it via RSS or email alerts. All the information is open to you and isn’t hidden. So if anything goes WAY out of line (which RARELY happens) you now see it and can correct it.

Plus there are almost always additional security measures. For example, in our area for HR information, only the HR director can post wikis or change them. There is another area where we let the employees post their HR information (for example a health and wellness and financial information) which is open. But if we opened up the official employee handbook (and yes, the official document is a wiki and not a MS Word Doc or PDF), any one could add vacation days (not that that would be all bad ).

You can usually set up a moderating function on forums, wikis, comments, etc.

But the security measures must be use judiciously (see ‘The Fence’ below).

YEA: That is right. For the most part, anyone can post anything. Be it right or wrong (which is tomorrow’s objection/post). And, as counterintuitive as this may seem at first, it is not all bad.

Number one, the training department didn’t need to ‘write’ it. Instead the employees taught each other. How great is that? Ya, it is not as pretty as a powerpoint presentation you may have given, nor quite as polished, but it was good information everyone needs to know and now anyone can find it!

Giving up control in this respect is a good thing. It is what you want to do. Feel the release. Breathe in – Breathe out…

The Fence: By implementing a social learning solution you sit on the control fence. Control to much and it won’t be used. But not controlling it at all is unwise. There needs to be a balance – enough structure and processes to give guidance yet enough freedom to allow the users to do what they want.

What do you think?

I did a conference session for the AmeriCorps NW Network this week.  One of the things I do in some of my sessions is do a little exercise on traditional communities.  We split up and pick different types of communities  – all offline.  Then we talk about the characteristics of those communities and relate them back to Social Learning and how to build these communities of learning.  Doing this exercise we find a lot of insights into how they work and how to build.

This group gave the best examples I have seen: The impoverished community, a group of Ultimate players, Burning Man and a 4×4 group.  This was such a great cross-section of different type of communities that we learned so much (at least I did – I hope the others did as well!).

For example, how do you join?  The impoverished community is by circumstance, the Ultimate players by coming and playing, Burning Man by signing up and registering, the 4×4 group by being voted in.  Each of the questions I went through brought great insight into how and why we might form communities of learning.

There is a lot to learn about a learning community if you step back and take a look at how ‘normal’ communities work, and how they don’t.

I did surgery this weekend on this blog. Extreme Makeover. Although it is not totally complete, it is close. It needed one badly!

Speaking of updating looks, I am trying to customize the front page of our Social Learning solution internally. It has the default page which shows an aggregate of most recent content for all wikis, discussions and blog posts. (Trying to customize it has been difficult. A great great solution overall, but as with everything there are pros and cons.) The problem with that is that each of those three have different lives: 1) They are each created in different intervals; 2) they all have different relevancy lengths and 3) they have different audience contexts. Imagine three related but different people living under one roof (maybe you don’t need to imagine too hard…)

WIKI: The wiki, at least internally and in our stage of development, has a rapid creation cycle. We have many which are created each day. Thus, they dominate the ‘Most Recent Activity’ aggregate shown on the first page. Plus, so many are created with varying topics, that the list becomes irrelevant. Unlike RSS where you can pick and choose what you information you want to show, this page is like the newspaper. Rarely do you care about every story. You want information that relates to you, not EVERYTHING. The wiki’s active life is short. For the most part, it is created and not many are changed or added to immediately.

DISCUSSIONS (forums): These have a shorter creation cycle. Currently, one is created only every few days. I expect that to pick up in the future. Their active life is usually short, but immediate. Ask a question, get an answer – a number of answers. The problem is that they are being burried by the wikis and unless you go specifically to the discussions, you would never know a new question has been asked.

BLOGS: The life of blogs can very depending on the person(s) writing them. For us, no one (almost) is using blogs because, again, they are getting buried unless the user specifically goes to check out the latest blog postings. Their active life is relatively short. When a post happens, usually comments follow pretty quickly. Then they taper off.

Putting all three together as a “Recent Activity” will usually not produce the results you want. And the results are usage. You want people in there using everything to share information. If information is shared and it is time sensitive (as usually forums and blogs are) you will want to make sure it has appropriate real estate for its life.