I had, as Harold’s original model provided the basis for, separate groups for Work Teams, Communities of Practice, and Social Networks. In Work Teams, I had included: share problems, co-coach, assist, brainstorm effectively, continuous feedback, welcome contributions, learn from mistakes, align with mission, narrate work, champion diversity, and measure improvement. MORE

From a conversation with my ITA colleagues, talking about the (self-imposed) death of L&D that Charles wrote about, Jane wondered what we might do if we were starting from scratch. I decided to take this on, thinking about an org that was already in operation, with it’s goals, processes, and practices, and what I might do if I were to come in and get it going (with the support of the executive team to do what I thought was right). MORE

One of the things to do with models is use them as the basis to explain and predict. And right now I’m working with the Coherent Organization model and looking at the implications for decisions. There are three layers: work teams composed of members from different communities of practice, that are connected outward to broader social networks. And of course they should share their learnings back with the community. MORE

What would an effective L&D unit be doing, and what would the employee/manager/exec experience be? I see employees experiencing less ‘training’ As I’ve said, effective training is expensive when done properly, and should be used only when significant skill shifts are needed. Employees would be tightly coupled to their work teams, and more loosely coupled to their communities of practice. MORE

Determinism is the philosophical idea that every event, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable result of preceding actions and that, given certain conditions, there is only one outcome. Deterministic views of the world assume everything is a jigsaw puzzle rather then a chess game and that for every problem there is a single solution. Although determinism is part of our world, we shouldn’t assume that its principles can be applied everywhere. MORE

In thinking a bit about the Future of Work, one of the issues is where to start. If we take the implications of the Coherent Organization to heart, we realize that the components include the work teams, the communities of practice (increasingly I think of it as a community of improvement ), and the broader network. A couple of principles fall into place for me. MORE

By combining the power of the human brain with technology in a way that facilitates work, collaboration and communication, leaders can turn learning into multifaceted performance support. Things are moving faster, and organizations have to be more nimble, responding to changes in their audiences, competitors and the context of work. Lots of the opportunities to improve come through the network, through the people we learn with and from. MORE

The impact of technology, globalization, ubiquitous connectivity, remote work and distributed work teams, and economy of individuals to name a few drivers have changed the face of workplace learning and performance dramatically. Refer to Ross Dawson’s The Future of Work for a detailed overview. The more of the same task they performed, the more efficient they became. Economy of scale was achieved. MORE

This is the article I wrote for the January edition of Inside Learning Technologies magazine. Social learning is a natural everyday phenomenon; simply put, we learn from our colleagues as we work with them. But an ESN also provides an ideal technological environment to host more formal social learning activities – in this way individuals can learn with and from one another in the very same way (and platform) that they do for working. MORE