Gambling on diamonds in the rough

Lately, I've been posting comments and questions about social learning in an inspiring new online forum that's very quickly amassed a collective of over 500 L&D practitioners, consultants and academics. This eclectic forum was set up using Yammer: free software that lets you create your own private or public social network - used by over 100,000 organisations to enable communication, collaboration and online information sharing through exchanging microblog posts similar to Twitter or Facebook updates. It's a fantastic hotbed of opinion, entertainment, and yes, learning.

For corporates, the potential pay-off from harnessing such online communities is huge but ultimately it's a gamble - both for an organisation's leadership in sanctioning employee time to actively engage with such specialist forums (whether internal or external) and for individuals themselves to balance their time effectively between community interaction and 'the day job'. Yes, collaborative efforts will occasionally spawn serendipitous leapfrogs in productivity to help speed through the 'to-do' list. However, the reality is that the resultant forums can quickly get clogged up with jumbled discussion threads and/or tempt users into divertingly entertaining, but fundamentally unproductive, distracting chatter.

Persistent users will sometimes find an information 'diamond in the rough' (which will bring them back for more) but for some the effort involved can feel like a time-sapping distraction.  If you happen to 'tune-in' to the right learning nugget or conversation with the right expert to nudge you in the right way just when you need it - great - but continually finding (and supporting others with) key insights in this way can be an ongoing labour of love.  

The question each participant ends up asking themselves is: does the learning/productivity value of an occasional 'eureka' moment really justify the time - and the opportunity cost - that I'd invest in maintaining my community links and searching for help?  I'm sure this is a tacit question posed by many line managers wondering how best to exploit collaboration tools to improve their workforce productivity.

There will always be those who'd prefer to just knuckle down and get on with their own work by themselves (and traditional management cultures who think likewise).  This is clearly missing a trick creatively and collaboratively - but how exactly to go about sparking and sustaining online communities that last and deliver value?

A new role for L&D?

Despite these basic challenges, I do believe that progressive organisations can unlock great value through effectively nurtured corporate social networks. Opening up access to experts and discussion threads will give your employees valuable insights and nudges, and are absolutely worth sponsoring even if they don't lead to a 'eureka' moment with every log-in.

The long and short of it is learning happens to all of us informally every day. Organisations may as well embrace this and come to terms with the fact that self-directed collaborative conversations are part of the fabric of productive work. The real question is: what can we as learning professionals do increase the chances of this happening to improve employee engagement and business performance?

In my view L&D's role should be to act as a 'change agent' to seek out all opportunities to foster progressive, performance-enhancing activity. Social network communities fall into this category. Such forums need to be intelligently planted and cultivated. Interestingly, the 'gardening' analogy seems quite helpful here (seeding, tending, nurturing a natural organic environment) - and has been a key refrain in many social learning community discussion threads.  I'm not sure we could go as far as 'pruning' discussions to make them easier to walk around (one man's weed is another man's wildflower) but you get the picture…

L&D should therefore strive to get more 'into' the workplace to help true collaboration to happen. We need to find a way to encourage productive, background conversations that make for interesting 'a-ha' moments (avoiding aimless chatter). Of course these conversations need to be ongoing and baked into 'the day job', and not just created as a temporary add-on to a formal L&D-delivered training course.

Also, L&D can help to promote and advertise the positive outcomes that stem from collaboration. If people can see the value that comes from a corporate social network, they're much more likely to get involved and they're more likely to contribute in the right way. 

Imagine what could happen in your organisation if you could foster interesting sparks of insight as well as a sense of camaraderie amongst similarly-minded individuals collaborating towards a common goal.

Onwards learning horticulturalists…

Al Bird is learning consultancy director at KnowledgePool He can be contacted at al.bird@knowledgepool.com