Social learning is more than a buzzword. It’s the missing piece for today’s Learning and Development teams. Nathan Kracklauer dives into why learning from, about and alongside others creates better outcomes. If you want real engagement and deeper impact, it’s time to put people back at the heart of learning
“I’d never heard the term ‘social learning’ before,” said Sue, a Learning and Development professional at a recent roundtable. “But that sounds like exactly what I’m looking for – tell me more!”
Learning is a profoundly social activity. Our skills and knowledge only become meaningful and applicable within a social context, within a community of practice
‘Social learning’ is part of the jargon of our training industry. The fact that ‘learning’ is something we do best when we do it with other people makes intuitive sense. That’s why the term resonates so much with people like Sue.
But what does it mean? Learning from other people? Learning about other people? Learning alongside other people? It means all of the above, of course, and more.
Learning from others: Transmission
Learning from other people is the most obvious way that learning is social. In instructor-led training (ILT), expert instructors transmit concepts and knowledge. They give us feedback on our performance as we try to put the instruction into practice. In ILT, feedback is also a mutual affair. By asking questions or inserting comments, we let the instructor know whether transmission is successful. We can close the loop between the transmission’s sender (the instructor) and the receiver (us, as learners).
We also learn from another person when the transmission is mediated across time and space, whether through books, videos or the familiar e-learning module. It’s hard to exaggerate how important mediated transmission is. Reading Plato’s Republic can send shivers down your spine as you realise that you are connecting to another mind across a 2,500-year chasm; a mind that doesn’t seem to be very different from our own.
But of course, none of us will ever close the loop with Plato! The absence of feedback – in either direction – is a serious drawback to learning from others in a mediated way. Later in our roundtable discussion, Sue shared more about her challenges. Her organisation had done a fantastic job providing access to a wide range of mediated resources: LinkedIn Learning, internal wikis, gamified self-study e-learning. It was great stuff, all of it. But Sue could tell that something was missing, something that social learning seemed to express.
Mediated transmission may have been invented to traverse time and space. But ever since the Gutenberg printing press, it’s all been about efficiency – one mind can share its wealth with all minds, at a cost approaching zero.
That this efficiency comes at the expense of effectiveness is something of which the training world is increasingly aware. In the pursuit of efficiency, organisations like Sue’s have overweighted transmission of knowledge in the portfolio of human capital development approaches.
Learning from others: Modelling and imitating
Walking and our gait, talking and our accent, our facial expressions and our sense of humour – we learn them from observing and imitating the people around us, and we pass them on to our closest kin. Imitation is not just the highest form of flattery; it’s also an effective, ancient and hard-wired way for us to learn from others. For both the model and the mime, imitation operates at conscious and unconscious levels.
Imitation can be mediated as well. We can learn our Jagger-like moves from music videos or the dance video game Just Dance. Ever since YouTube, we’ve preferred videos of experts over cumbersome instruction manuals when searching for solutions to all sorts of life challenges, such as fixing the dishwasher.
Specific routines like dishwasher repair or Just Dance choreography can be learnt from imitation. But job performance typically hinges on more than performing a step-by-step routine. High performance hinges on being able to follow the rules in your sleep but also knowing when to break them. It hinges on understanding that not just what you do, but how you do it affects others – your team, your customers and ultimately all the organisation’s stakeholders. It hinges on adopting what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called a praxis: a mindset and a worldview that situate skills and knowledge within a social context.
For example, customer service and quality assurance involve routine steps, and some of their routines can look remarkably similar. But the overall praxes of customer service and quality assurance are extremely different.
A praxis is learnt from others partly by transmission, but crucially also from imitation. The entire set of habits, mental models and worldview of quality assurance is probably not something even a pro can bring to conscious awareness, never mind write down or expound about. Their junior colleagues learn it through osmosis.
To harness the power of imitation, organisations have to deploy tools and learning frameworks that go beyond mere transmission of skills and knowledge. They have to embed practices like apprenticeships, job-shadowing, mentoring and job rotations into the very structure of the organisation.
It’s still an open question how organisations can embed these kinds of practices and build an osmosis-enabling environment in the work-from-home world. That’s why formal, shared learning experiences can facilitate the diffusion of tacit expertise, even when the training content is about something completely unrelated. Just getting people in the room together – even if it’s in a virtual room – can help build a community and engineer the exchange of ideas.
Learning about others
One of the most important skill sets in most jobs is interacting effectively with others. Even when training content is not especially people-oriented – say, training network specialists on a new technology – a shared learning environment can lead to discussions and insights about how we tick and how others tick too, as long as the learning experience is designed around peer-to-peer interaction.
Almost all jobs involve interactions with others. Those interactions can be more or less effective. Team-based learning activities can help develop the ‘people skills’ required to perform well at a task, even when the subject matter isn’t directly about people skills. Because the stakes are lower in the context of a training programme, participants may be more willing to make themselves vulnerable than on the job. That can make a training session a powerful environment in which to learn about yourself, about others and about how people collaborate.
Learning alongside others: Benchmarking
We all bring different prior experiences to the table, which means that peers can also learn from each other. Sometimes they learn better from peers than from instructors, who may be so far advanced that they have difficulty relating to the immediate challenges of those struggling with the first roadblocks.
But in cohort-based learning experiences, participants don’t just learn from or about each other. By working alongside each other, they also support each other’s engagement.
For some, it’s just more fun to do things with others than alone. But that might not be true for everyone. Travelling to a remote location, or signing into yet another webinar, often with perfect strangers, may not be ‘more fun’ than a nice self-study course that you can pause at will and consume while you chop vegetables. But there’s more to learning alongside others than just having fun; something that provides value to introverts and extroverts alike.
We’ve observed a few different interaction mechanisms that fit under the head of ‘personal benchmarking’. It’s especially obvious in our programmes about finance for non-financial managers. Some participants arrive with a bad case of imposter syndrome. Their anxiety forms a barrier to learning… until they realise how many of their peers are in the same boat: “Whew. I’m not alone!”
Conversely, for others, realising how far ahead some of their peers are can inspire a productive kind of anxiety: “I really need to up my game.”
Knowing where you stand among your peers – and that cocktail of comfort and anxiety – opens minds and whets the appetite for learning in ways that go far beyond the joys of camaraderie.
The social context
With information technology driving the cost of transmitting one person’s expertise nearly to zero, organisations have focused for too long on improving the efficiency of training delivery, at the expense of separating learners from each other. Today, using generative artificial intelligence to enable solitary practice, get feedback and provide just-in-time access to information can be highly beneficial. But it’s also yet another claim on our time and attention that takes us away from connecting with real minds.
Learning is a profoundly social activity. Our skills and knowledge only become meaningful and applicable within a social context, within a community of practice. In a community of practice is where we acquire the knowledge that could never be condensed into instructionally designed learning modules.
Especially in the context of remote work, we need to do more to empower people to learn from, about and alongside each other if we want to build our organisations’ human capital and our own.
Nathan Kracklauer is Chief Research Officer at Abilitie and co-author of The 12-Week MBA
