Enterprise - Government - Web - School - Work - HR - PR - Publishing - Management - Market Research - Sales - Learning - Library - Video - Media - Education - Surveillance - Electricity - Community - Food.
What do they have in common? These terms have gained surges in interest from having “2.0” carved in their history.
The purpose of this software-inspired insignia, however, varies from instance to instance. It usually implies some allegiance with Web 2.0, the “social Web.” I heard repeatedly at the recent Gov 2.0 Summit, hosted by O'Reilly that “Govt 2.0 should be a platform to design programs that support citizens and agencies creating more than any one of us could do alone.” Even conference host Tim O'Reilly noted that the meaning varies. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference this past June, the Two-dot-0 meant more transparency and tools supporting distributed modular work. Both assert an operating system for society is at hand. Neither easily garner enthusiasm from those not attending the event, and sometimes is even scoffed at by those who are staking their careers on a belief in 2.0-magic.
The “2.0” appended to so many terms is shorthand at best, distracting jargon at worst.
The ideals behind 2.0 initiatives are applaudable, but not always laudable. When they sidestep the context of today to paint a glossy picture of tomorrow I'm left wondering how they'll engage those back at the office. Their politically correct language leaves me thinking they're not going far enough.
Perhaps I'm jaded by this sort of versioning because I joined the software industry full-time prior to the release of DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0. Those were true revisions of all that came before them. If you're a Mac user who insists nothing really changes on a PC, then consider parallels of those times: Apple ][ and Macintosh SE. Or consider what gaming consoles were like before audio connected players across continents.
A new major release number (or Snow Leopardesqe name) should signify the arrival of something wholly different. Not just that we're ready for something new. Not just putting all data into a machine readable format and online. Or with the ability to tag a document and put it into the cloud. Or even with the capacity to share big ideas a few dozen characters at a time. Simple, clear, searchable, easy, online, user-friendly, dummy-proof, gradient, rounded, collaborative, many2many. Woohoo, but enough?
Erick Taft (@erick1970) said via the very 2.0 Twitter: "Maybe 2.0 should denote something that requires vastly different skills than were required in the past." This involves more than training and learning. Departments, especially but not limited to IT, ought to be willing to hire people with radically different skill sets.
The “2.0” tagged onto an industry or skillset calls us to look deeply at previous practices and admit it's time for what my teenage-self called a "Do-over." Grant a mulligan on broken work practices and outmoded institutions. Don't just play along, marketing the old as the re-new, now with a different name but essentially the same old ____.
Use “2.0” as a call to action.
Andrew McAfee (@amcafee), who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has an eponymous book coming out shortly said, "This is not in addition to other things we are doing. This is a replacement for what we used to do."
No more dinking around the edges. Start rocking the boat. Until the cooler falls over, it's hard to see what floats.
Why now? As VISA founder Dee Hock said a decade ago, "It's far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism."
"Throw up your hands if you choose, ignore the conversation if you choose. The facts still remain, it’s not working. Mindlessly doing the same thing and expecting different results is… well, you know how the story goes." adds Paula Thornton (@rotkapchen).
Where do we begin to do over? First, stop honoring sacred cows for their endurance. I know no organization or individual better off today than they were four years ago but that doesn't mean I believe preserving the old ways will be our salvation.
Next, no matter your industry's "1.0," take a close look at what needs to change. Study the postmortems. Dig through the bug reports. Observe the man in the mirror. Examine it as if you are about to be given the world's greatest gift: a chance to create something worthwhile.
Third, get out of your fish bowl. Interview people on the street about their perceptions. Talk with your customers, your citizens, your students, whomever you serve. Also ask your mother or your Uncle Albert for their thoughts. Then ask a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old: they seem to know everything, though one has to apply the filter of experience to their insights. [I think people get too much credit for constantly rediscovering the wheel under different names]. Their feedback won't jerk you wildly off course. It will help illuminate your insider's perspective with natural light.
Then start where you are. Work to create something worthwhile, not for its market valuation or ability to get you votes. Back in 2006, Mitch Ratcliffe (@godsdog) pointed out, "If we get caught up about the name of the thing we're building, we're just wasting time." Identify yourself with the idea and join with others who share uncommon visions about what the world needs now. They may call it “2.0” or they may be too busy pursuing the work to call it anything.
Steve Ressler, Founder of GovLoop.com describes his vision this way:
Government 2.0 is about defining the next generation of government. It's a change of how government solves problems and delivers services. A change in: Culture - Move from top-down one-way to collaborative and two-way. Participants - Move from gov and gov contractors to include non-profits, citizens, social entrepreneurs, startups, and more. Human capital - Move from legacy generation of government baby boomers to digital natives and Gen C. Speed - Move from big, large, long-term projects to a culture of speed, pilot, and beta. Collaboration - Move from agency silos to working across Fed/State/Local lines and departments.
Some people will always seem to prefer what writer and activist Micah Sifry (@MIsif) refers to as version "0.2, or even less than that,” a way of denoting how far something has to go to achieve the status of a full release rather than an incremental improvement. It's your job to show them tangible proof there is now something more. The difference between major release numbers and versioning (the little changes we note) is that with the latter, when you mess up you can easily get back to a previous working version. Well folks, there aren't many working versions worth returning to.<
Someday any numbering scheme will have lost its raison d'etre. As Ari Herzog, an online media strategist, said to me over lunch 2.0 at the Summit, "It's just government."
And one more thing: Calling everything "2.0" gives credit for all change to the current generation. Many institutions are on far more than their second rev. Publishing, for instance, is on its sixth or ninth rev, not its second. There are innumerable versions of things. It's simplistic, silly, and conceited to call everything "2.0." It's taking credit before credit is due.
Let's at least use this moment in time to acknowledge we now have the tools to make change. Let's not see this most clearly with 2.0-2.0 hindsight.
Marcia Conner > www.marciaconner.com > @marciacmarcia focuses on enterprise social messaging and learning culture design. She's a 20-year veteran of the enterprise technology market, currently Senior Enterprise Strategist for Pistachio Consulting.
Humans have conveyed short messages, rife with meaning, for over thirty thousand years. Smoke signals have traversed the airways. Expressive quips filled Seinfeld’s show. At all stages and ages, we burst forward.
Up, dada.
Look at my train.
No, no, no.
Keys please.
Outta here.
How cool is that?
I do.
Be back before dinner.
The flight was canceled?!
Rest in peace.
Apparently people just don't notice how little is said while so much is conveyed. Why else would so many call the slew of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 social messaging tools revolutionary?
Consumer-facing Twitter and corporate-ready Socialtext Signals, Socialcast, Present.ly, Yammer (to name a few) are noteworthy, evolutionary, and crazy cool. They amplify voices and net people-picked answers fast. They can even update our collaboration capacity; improving our mindfulness by encouraging us to ask ourselves consistently, “Is this something I should share?”
What they do, though -- enable sharing micro-bursts with interested people -- has existed for ages, though. Literally. What’s new is how they help us do it (forcing compactness and distributing to portable devices) and who we share with (often previous strangers who share our passions).
As the father of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski said, in tweet-like-fashion, “The map is not the territory.”
Twitter is no more game changing than BMX racing’s appearance as an Olympic sport.
While on a panel recently about, “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise,” I pantomimed to the audience, “Please tweet what he just said.” This replaced for me, “Note to self: messages are like rearview mirrors, offering us all extra peripheral vision." In a less microphoned venue I might have whispered to someone near by, “Brilliant comparison.”
As a species we are cognitive misers, sifting through noise all day. We seek designs to incorporate, ideas to learn from, puzzles to untangle, stats to inform decisions. Cave dwellers did this. So did the Founding Fathers and their families. Paul Revere and William Dawes were replaced by the telegram, replaced by the radio, replaced by the telephone, augmented by Twitter, enabled by the iPhone. It’s the people, far from stupid. Making connections, reflecting, sharing, bursting along.
And before you tell IT that microsharing is as old as humankind, yet your new online social network is something fundamentally different, think again. Consider the shoulders you are standing on to see so far. Even the Athenians were creating a company of (social) citizens, forming networks or networks, with democratic values, governance structures and participatory practices.
Consider what we want to do, then determine which tools support you doing it better, farther, wider, faster. You have been microsharing and networking since you first asked to be carried and your toys were made of wood. In the event the Internet went away tomorrow, you could continue to burst and connect with those in close proximity, griping about how much you miss your tools.
----------
Marcia Conner > www.marciaconner.com > @marciacmarcia focuses on enterprise social messaging and learning culture design. She's a 20-year veteran of the enterprise technology market, currently Senior Enterprise Strategist for Pistachio Consulting.
I began using Twitter out of spite. Fast Company had a mass website upgrade and some links weren't working. Our editor was suddenly unreachable (after saying we should contact her if we needed any help). I had a deadline and I was stuck. Looking for additional contact information in Plaxo, I saw she was tweeting from a cab, commenting on the messenger's bike beside her.
Whua? Did she not realize people could see her goofing off? Quickly enough, she answered my question and I was on my way. I wondered what could be so compelling about Twitter for someone with her busy schedule to use it. She's brilliant, with many pursuits; could Twitter be that beneficial, for someone like her?
I became determined to find out.
I opened a Twitter account.
I posted several updates.
By the end of the first week...
I understood.
In the year since, I credit Lynne for turning me on to Twitter and I've discovered something more valuable than the hyped “collaborative sharing” benefits. I've witnessed coworkers outside of clearly defined roles. I’ve peeked into their thoughts, admired their perspectives and felt their passions. This fuels my trust and broadens my access to them. I now see a well-roundedness attained previously only by spending long hours together, usually outside of normal work hours -- and who has time for that? Learning about Lynne's zest for bicycles and exchange, I became more committed to her success.
Before Twitter (and her enterprise-strength counterparts) we didn't share our layered thoughts casually so we appeared always on task. Via Twitter, you now see my mind periodically follows tangents, that sometimes circle back, and other times leads to wholly new roads. Engaging with a wide circle of people -- celebrating our focuses and interests along the edge -- deepens and widens everything we do.
Here are four reasons to connect work with the personal -- the insights and the whys.
Establish Your Voice
People don't necessarily tweet about their job. They tweet about their work; what they're passionate about, their craft. When we admit we have other dimensions, be more transparent, and practice authenticity, we provide a context to our thoughts and our behaviors while also becoming comfortable with them in public.
Mix Up Silos
Innovation comes from seeing the old in fresh ways, sussing out subtleties and trends, and adding unique twists. Thinking laterally then offers endless directions to branch out. Sparks fly and fresh ideas emerge at the intersection of wildly divergent memes. Tell me one... more... time about your demo and it's unlikely I'll have an epiphany. Twitter about something you learned from a stranger while searching for the room -- now you have my attention.
Build Trusted Relationships
I once read it takes new coworkers five months to trust one another enough for true collaboration. In my experience, that time is longer if you never spend time together in person, getting a feel for their priorities, experiencing firsthand their eccentricities, witnessing their humanity among to-dos. Something changes when you witness their adoration of bedtime stories, fine poetry, drooling mutts or Trader Joe's. What you might have interpreted as an all-business style lightens as you realize you would welcome them on a camping trip or stuck beside you on a long late-night flight.
And possibly most critical at this moment in history...
Preserve the Soul
Moving forward -- as a species, a society, an economy on the verge of doing itself in -- means inviting in the portions of the self we once left in the car. It's long past time we liberate the parts of ourselves that don't belong to our employers so our full selves can do their best work. The poet David Whyte says, "In a sense, the very part of us that doesn't have the least interest in the organization is our greatest offering to it. It is the part that opens the window of the imagination and allows fresh air into the meeting room. It is the part that can put its foot on the brake when the organization is running itself off a cliff."
By the way, I don't encourage endless drivel about traffic as you putter toward the client's office, nor suggest you post minutia about your lunch to fill time. I advocate edu-tweeting and adding other things personally important to the enterprise stream so people at work benefit from a richer you.
The trouble with broaching this delicate topic, though, reminding leaders and learners everywhere that work is more than making cogs, is what Terry Pratchett calls Réjà Vu: The feeling that I will be here again. In the meantime, let's at least begin to open a few more windows. If there is a bicycle beside you, all the better.
Share your multidimensional insights here or 140-characters at a time on Twitter @marciamarcia.
----------
Marcia Conner >> www.marciaconner.com
Wondering if "Twitter in the Enterprise" is an overblown fad or a real opportunity you need to understand now? This post addresses only a small part of the story. For more, join me Thursday April 9, 2009 at noon ET for the first of three free webinars on corporate social messaging I'll co-host with Laura Fitton (@pistachio) and Ross Mayfield (@Ross).
The first article in this series focused on enrolling the help of more people.
The second article addressed free and lost-cost content.
The third article (here) approaches nontraditional fundraising.
This year, more than most, with its fresh-start feeling, calls us to look ahead instead of looking back. To help people learn new things amid tightening belts and hiring freezes, here are a handful of ways to break through.
Sell Off
If you head a department, especially an education group, you probably have intellectual and physical assets people would want to buy. From packaged workshops and elearning programs to templates and cheat-sheets, t-shirts and Chochkies look around for items to sell. Consider talking with your CFO about selling education-related goods in the company store, on your website, through a newsletter or company catalog to recoup some of the money your organization may have lost. Customers, businesses in similar fields and local schools welcome well-crafted learning materials and promotional items.
Even education departments run as profit centers don't always examine absolutely everything they create or have put together in years past as possible sources of revenue. Your company's outbound sales department may welcome having one more thing to offer and customers might love an opportunity to get and idea of what else you do.
A government contractor I worked with found the procedures manuals they had created for clients could be easily turned into templates to create DIY public service-facing guides. They sold several hundred kits to organizations that didn't have the funds to have original manuals created for them.
Ask people in your social network what educational goods their organizations are shopping for to gain quick market data from your pool of available products so that you raise more money than a bake sale… although in tough economic times, you might consider one of those, too!
Swap Out
Does your company have something an education supplier or independent trainer might covet -- that you don't want to sell? An automotive parts supplier I work with trades components for the use of classroom space and management training from a local trade school that has a shop class needing hard-to-find machinery. A technology company barters their productivity software for elearning modules from an educational-software provider. An incentives firm offered a vacation to the Bahamas for a small group of IT trainers who helped them get their staff trained on a new network. Maybe your company has box seats at a sports event or local theater, restaurant discounts, theme park tickets. These rewards may seem passé to you yet a welcome benefit for someone else.
Bartering is a worthwhile path to pursue, but make sure to become familiar with applicable IRS guidelines for bartering should you go this route and also talk with your finance department before making a big swap. There are also websites that specialize in placing a point value on swaps so that what you have to offer is worth something to get something else.
Another creative approach to budgeting is to develop methods for people to share their time: not unlike old fashion barn-raisings. For example, if a group in PR wants to learn how to use social media as a publicity tool but their interest is too specific to develop a full course, put out a call to the social media power-users in your organization to mentor or even host a brief show-and-tell to build the department's knowledge shelter. In exchange, the PR team could show the social media buffs a few tricks they've learned about disclosure as a brand-building tool.
Although not a monetary exchange in the traditional sense, a Pay it Forward approach might also garner you great rewards. Apex Performance, for instance, has helped students, student athletes and pro athletes with mental skills coaching which has led them to reach new personal-bests. In the process, the training skills company gained some inspirational friends and marketable evangelists.
Seek Samples
Training companies of all sizes offer free trials of classes and products to get a foot in your enterprise. Contact a company from which you're interested in learning or developing a relationship and ask what they can provide for free (or at least at a sizable discount). However, I don't suggest you snooker them into providing something you're unable or unwilling to pay for in the future if it proves to meet your needs.
Elearning development companies offer trial versions of their software that may meet your needs without ever requiring you to download the full version. iSpring, for instance, converts PowerPoint presentations to Flash and their free version preserves narration, animations, timing, transitions and notes.
For trial versions that require buying a license, I heard about a clever project manager who used a money-savvy technique before her company purchased Articulate. She added an appointment to her calendar for 25 days from the day she made the decision to purchase the license, 5 days in on the 30-day trial. This allowed her to start using the software right away while push the budget hit into the next quarter.
Simplify Everything
While most people think of simplification as a lifestyle decision, organizations can often benefit from paring back in the name of gaining more. Work done at Bain & Co. showed companies with the lowest complexity grew 30-50% faster than their average competitors. Ask, "What would we look like if we offered just one product or provided only one service?" Then add variety back in, product by product, service by service. Gauge customer interest and incremental revenues alongside an estimate of the new costs that would come with more variables. The point where costs start to outweighing revenues (the value to your organization if you don't sell something), is your innovation fulcrum. By figuring this out, you provide the right degree of variety and operational complexity while cutting costs and widening margins.
We can all learn from companies like Honda whose customers can have any type of car, as long as it's one of 32 build-combinations in one of four colors. Five Guys restaurants grew faster than its burger & fry rivals this past year amid a declining market, with only eight items on the menu.
At the risk of sounding too obvious, consider consolidating teams, projects, classes, or even job functions. Or, do the reverse: Rather than offer one long program, consider ten smaller courses. The possibilities are endless once you’re motivated to make frugality part of your core.
If you find value in frugality or you have your own favorite low-cost solutions, comment here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia.
----------
When a dear friend sailed away from the town he'd called home for decades, he probably assumed his small cadre of Twitter followers was alerted to his bon voyage. Not so. I only learned about his departure hours later when a mutual friend mentioned it in his updates and I followed a link. There I learned I'd missed not only the launch; I hadn't seen a handful of fascinating updates, critical changes, and significant life events posted during hours I'm rarely online.
This fueled my growing fascination with what I call the time-of-day phenomenon (#TODP) happening in the two social networks I frequent most: Twitter and Facebook. Although I assume I keep up with people there, in truth, I'm beginning to see I'm mostly aware of those who are typing during the same blocks of time as me. In techno-jargon, although these tools offer a way communicate asynchronously, I learn the most from the synchronous communication.
The temporal communication flow is skewed to the people I see updating in real-time. Unless I read way back through my stream, I'm not seeing the posts of those who I really want to learn from.
Although I often check in first thing in the morning, I'm usually writing and reading at night on the East Coast, more apt to see the after-supper crowd on the West Coast, early risers in Europe, and others in my part of the world who are also sneaking in work after light’s out for our kiddos.
Does that mean updates I receive have less breaking news and more cerebral end-of-the-day ponderings? Perhaps. Are there more bleary eyed repost and quick replies than original information? Probably. Are there some people, who update frequently during the day, who I haven't seen an update from in months? Definitely.
I rely on direct messages, replies, comments, and retweets. My asymmetric follow proves invaluable for extending my research arms but search terms I track sometimes get more attention than people I adore.
Sure, I could chalk this up to the everyday proximity issue we face in all social situations. We learn more from those around us (physically and virtually) than anyone else. What's different here is that it doesn't feel proximate. I recently missed a local friend moving her entire household because she's an early-morning poster and we didn't see each other for a few weeks..
Tomorrow I'm going to seek out twitter tools that will allow me to group those I want to watch most closely. I've also begun to follow fewer people in favor of reading their blogs instead. On Facebook, I'm going to devote a little more time to searching back through the day's posts from friends. I'm also going to check in with people I haven't heard from recently, like my sea fairing friend, just to see what they're up to. While up until recently I felt confident I’d be alerted directly if there was something vital I needed to know, as these tools become more ubiquitous, there might be less alerting my way.
If you have thought about this timely phenomenon or if you sometimes feel like Susan Heim who twittered, "I dreamed last night that I was at a Twitter party and I couldn't keep up!" comment here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia.
The first article in this series focused on enrolling the help of more people.
The second article (here) addresses free and lost-cost content.
The third article approaches nontraditional fundraising.
Contrary to analysis showing learning to be one of the only truly competitive weapons organizations can control, training departments are rarely well funded. It's the nature of being viewed as an expense against the bottom line. During slow times in the economy, many organizations scrutinize education expenditures even more than usual. Thankfully there are many ways to help people learn without copious capital.
Marshal Thrifty Materials
A few days ago, while in search of a specific Tonka truck, I saw one of my town's richest women checking out at Kmart in a neighboring community. I don't believe her family's fortune has been frittered away. I imagine she just can't bear paying a bundle for all-cotton briefs. Like most truly wealthy people (and organizations) I know, frugality is in her genes. She probably shopped there last year, too. Thrifty strategies work equally well in laden and lean times.
My second suggestion in this more learning with less series is to investigate inexpensive educational materials in locations you may never have looked before. Without trying to sound like I'm 93 years old, I want to point out that "in my day" free educational offerings weren't as plentiful as they are today, and those that were dirt cheap looked like dirt.
Now there are millions of educational modules available to you and your organization free of charge, only requiring the legwork to find them and the time spent sifting through an Internet-size course catalog. The Open Courseware Consortium offers free college-level programs from the likes of MIT, Carnegie Melon and UC Irvine based on an evidence-based design (there are more than 100 business courses available). The Open University in the UK has been presenting free courses since the 1960s and provides mashup tools. There are dozens of learning object repositories across the globe. A former professor at the NYU Stern School of Management offers free on-line management classes to anyone who wants to learn. And you've heard of Wikipedia, did you know there's also a Wikiversity?
You may not find a course for your sales team to introduce customers to your newest product, but then again you might.. Ask your business partners what they have in development, and devote your meager resources to creating what is absolutely unlike anything out there today.
Gone are the days of customizing a general program to meet the subtle differences between the style of your leaders and those at a company down the road. A younger workforce is far more accustomed to personalizing information for themselves. Well, they should be unless you’ve trained them not to be. If you're still paying to have programs made to fit your culture, stop that practice and discover your people can make the leap. See, I've just saved you a few grand.
Go Low, Go High
Courseware doesn't always come in wrappers marked, "Learn Here." [Low tech] books are powerful and widely available, if not free through a swap, then at a lower cost than materials labeled as education content. The Dummies series has sold millions across many business themes. Visual QuickStart Guides have helped me master many tech applications, and with an estimated 150 million books available today, few topics are left untouched.
There's also the high tech route. Instructables has wonderful and fun tutorials on opportune topics. The Dummies people aren't really dumb after all. They've launched Dummies.com with how-to information across a broad range of themes. Howtoons offers cartoons showing kids-at-heart how to build things.
On the low, many colleges and community organizations sponsor free lectures on timely subjects. Check with business schools about getting on their mailing list; your local chamber of commerce to find out if the programs are posted on a schedule.
Webinars and podcasts are also widely available through organizations such as Gartner, strategy+business, WebEx, and Harvard Business School. Sites like WiZiQ make it easy for people to attend public sessions on various topics from academics to anything under the sun. In the spirit on OpenCourseware, UC Berkeley webcasts select courses and campus events for on-demand viewing
Winning the best low-tech low-cost education solution I've heard: a board of directors I work with peripherally has forgone its quarterly (high-priced) guest speaker at meetings in favor of passing out hot business books. Each board member reads one chapter prior to the meeting and gives a short presentation on the most relevant parts to the organization's governance. Refrain from imaging boring book-reports. These are gifted communicators using their existing skills to share key information with colleagues. Economically.
Widen Your Net
Not only should you seek publicly available materials, you probably have more educational content in your organization today than you could ever imagine. Create outreach programs to alert everyone and anyone in your organizational ecosystem that you'd like to know about the programs and materials -- be it full courses or small job aides -- they've created over the years. Make part of your job cataloging and linking to these resources so that other people can find them and benefit from them, too.
RedHat University discovered that in the open-source tradition they are accustomed to, people affiliated with their organization and their products had not only created programs about their technology. They had also extended course offerings and modified the programs in very useful ways. By reaching out to the people who had done this work, they encouraged more "Not Made Here" efforts and they also learned about a treasure-trove of materials the University would never have enough staff to create.
The Learning Resources Center of the United Nations Development Programme, in a similar effort, created a very low-cost newspaper-style learning resources catalog that could be sent out to 150 offices worldwide, promoting different approaches to staff development and listing all education opportunities available from UNDP's divisions.
By stirring in the work of onlookers, they'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends…
If you find value in frugality or you have your own favorite low-cost solutions, write here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia.
----------
I've directed large education organizations with huge budgets and small departments without a dime. Training rooms I managed accounted for the largest portion of real estate on a spatial corporate campus and another time I ran the training function of a startup out of my attic office. The journey has been a productive one, sometimes flush with money, other times only rich in experience. Each has its merits and all were educational.
So when I began getting asked by education execs for tips on how to manage the corporate education function with less, I wasn't surprised. Working in extreme situations comes naturally to me and that reputation draws me into conversations with people who don't know where else to turn. With each call, I've reminded people approaches they've forgotten amid recent stresses and pointed to new approaches they may have missed.
I believe this is a great time to be learning while short on cash. Never before in modern history has it been so easy to run a training department (or be accountable for people's learning when you're in another department yet still focused on knowledge transfer) without large budgets, blocks of free time, or even an organization to help marshal your resources.
Deputize More Trainers
My first suggestion is to increase the number of teaching opportunities for people throughout your organization. Although the best way to learn is to teach, in recent years I've seen a trend to bulk up training organizations and reduce reliance on in-house subject matter experts as instructors, managers as mentors, and new employees as a source of fresh knowledge.
By relying mostly on the training department to teach, fewer people remember that educating is part of their job, there is less opportunity for employees at all levels to improve their facilitation skills, and the time-tested, "Gotta learn this now," which comes from the pressure of explaining it to someone else, dissipates into the regular old rhythm of work. Worse yet, this change of policy shuts down a vital source of innovation in our organizations: the practice of capturing as much new outsider insight from new recruits as we can before they've gone "native," leaving their old responsibilities and brain cells behind.
The Exchanged
At Microsoft, at a time we were challenged to train throngs of people with very little funding, we met with all of the managers in our division to ask if they could each volunteer one person for a 3-month period to work part time -- sometimes just for a few hours a week, in other cases practically full time -- to get some trainer-training and help enlarge our small team's capacity. While we were very nervous about their receptiveness to our proposal, fourteen managers took the offer to their respective teams and found people not only willing but very enthusiastic to be part of the effort. As a result from this type of creativity, the employees grew their teaching skills, had an excuse to learn some new cool stuff, and their teams widened their bench-strength considerably.
The Unprocessed
The benefits of giving new hires, even those just out of school, an early job assignment to teach people in their new organization about what they learned before they arrived may be the best investment of time (not money) you make. Empowering new employees in every part of the organization to teach what they know gives them a chance to feel competent at a time when they may not be feeling all that sturdy and it gives your organization an almost unlimited low-cost source of diverse and fresh information. If lunch-time talks mean they don't get the time they want to bond with new co-workers, create a Friday afternoon panel where a seasoned employee with a Tonight Show-style personality interviews new employees about themselves and some of the lessons they learned in previous situations. Film the show and post it on your intranet. There are many creative ways to gather and share information at little or no cost; it just takes some imagination and motivation.
The Supercool
Thinking this is all too 20th Century? Consider adding a supercool bottom-up, grassroots component to your education efforts. Modeled after the Supercool School Facebook app, which allows participants to initiate (and join in on) learning programs for topics they want to learn about, you can do the same within your enterprise. When enough people have joined together with a request, open a teaching position and anyone willing and able to teach may. This says to people in your larger ecosystem, "Here are programs where your expertise is requested now. Who's interested?"
It's no shame for an education department to focus most of their resources on classes for the masses. The money you have should make the largest possible impact. That also may mean there's no other vehicle for taking advantage of the long tail. For example, if a small group of people are interested in learning how Twitter can be used on the job, but there isn’t a strategic need or numbers to justify a course, most training departments wouldn't step up. If the group has an easy way to find an instructor, though, why stop them? This self-organizing model offers a vehicle for people to enroll in and teach class on topics interesting to only a few people, and it gets more instructors, not fewer, excited about teaching what they know.
Erik Davis and several of his colleagues at Booz Allen Hamilton, are piloting a hybrid supercool approach by using their internal social media software to post Craig's List-style classified ads where people can request and respond to learning opportunities. Their social media space has become a hub for people offering and seeking goods: education, learning, and the teaching that leads to wider knowledge transfer and deeper responsibility throughout the organization. And it costs next to nothing.
While I encourage you to enlist the teaching skills of people throughout your organization, please realize this doesn't need to be only for courses. Consider job swaps or have novices shadow expert employees.
Every activity that helps people become mindful about their role as educators ups the conversation about learning in the workplace and leads to people learning more.
If you don't believe in the traditional separation of learners and teachers, either, or you have your own favorite low-cost solutions, comment here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia.
The second article in this series addresses free and lost-cost content.
The third article approaches nontraditional fundraising.
----------
Business leaders tell me they can't use Twitter (or its enterprise-strength counterparts) because they don't have enough space to capture deep thoughts and bright vision. This admission often follows a conversation about why they don't want their people to use these tools, which ironically often has more to do with productivity and legalities than making room to say something big. As part of my ongoing effort to address the skeptics, here is one specific question I hear frequently and details on how I respond.
Question: How can I say something substantive with Twitter?
Answer: Practice. (131)*
* When you "tweet" (the slang for writing a microsharing message) the number of remaining characters you can use appears beside the box where you type. I've included these numbers to give you a sense of how much more I could have been written.
Leadership involves sharing seminal concepts and creating an environment where these ideas can come to life in everyone's everyday work. In an age of shrinking attention spans and economic distractions, clear concise messages play best. Few of us listen long so stop dinking around the edges. Get on with it. Now's the time to be brief even if learning to be succinct can take time.
Blaise Pascal wrote (not in Twitter but in a letter from 1656): I have made this letter longer because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter. (55)
At first, it can take more time to write something laconic than to write something long. In my experience, working with dozens of leaders focused on this specific challenge, the process gets easier and more effective within a few weeks. And this newfound skill can be used in other settings where being crisp sells.
I suggested recently: Think of Twittering as training for an elevator pitch completed by the 2nd floor. (62)
Short messages allows readers to approach updates with a headline scanner's mindset, skimming a large number of post quickly, ignoring the ones of no interest, and grasping the interesting ones with little additional cognitive load. This means we can quickly process a message stream and then turn our attention back to other tasks. The efficiency is so palpable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. (0)
The aim of these short bursts is not to be simple (although plenty of people use Twitter for updates that are at best simple). I believe we, as business leaders, are most effective when we say important things in simple ways. Offer up timely stats, your analysis, or a direct link to something you've just read. If you want to help people work smarter by understanding what you're seeing, why not point them directly to what you see and then give them a glimpse of why you believe it matters?
George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research wrote: Thinking that if the financial ship can be righted, the economy should be OK. (63)
An increasing number of CEOs are using Twitter and similar tools for the enterprise because microsharing also provides an opportunity to open dialog within an organization, throughout an enterprise and with customers-to-be. With a few words of prompting, people (who you might not even know) can provide expert testimony, gut-level hunches and field views you'd never see otherwise. You can even collaboratively brainstorm without ordering in lunch.
Jonena Relth wrote: Growing leaders in our organizations requires modeling what we want people to do and become.
I believe there is no better way to keep leadership and vision in mind than chronicling and acting on it day in and day out. You just need to begin.
And if you're still stuck on the actual be brief part because you're a member of my friend and colleague Wayne Hodgins' ad-hoc club, "Why use a sentence when a paragraph will do?" -- begin modeling by learning how.
Ask your kids for tips on text-messaging shorthand.
Remove anything that's implied.
Edit mercilessly.
Dust off that thesaurus or crossword dictionary to find shorter words.
Now get on with it. (121)
Have a question you'd like me to answer? Ask here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia
Answers to executives' tough questions about microsharing in the enterprise.
As the enterprise microsharing market grows all in, I hear from skeptical leaders befuddled by this trend, wanting to be reassured their people aren't simply wasting time. Here are specific questions I've received and how I respond to each.
Question: How can all of this yammering be good for business and my bottom line?
Answer: In tough economical times, business managers seem to become critical of every activity even those generating the energy required for success. Break down the hype you have about what fosters your competitive advantage and you may come to realize your only lasting competitive advantage is the ability to learn and apply the right things faster than your competitors. Once you're there, you'll probably notice innovations and learnings come largely from the little moments between the activities we've previously thought of as jobs.
Microsharing (a less intimidating term, I've found, than microblogging) is astounding my clients as it liberates and bridges information in and around their organization in ways they hadn't even known they were missing before. Sure, its use needs to be managed, but the same could be said about telephones, email and meetings.
Let me answer this in a different way, too, though. Before focusing your accusations on social software, do a quick reality-check about the methods and measure of how people around your organization are communicating and collaborating today. Knowledge is fundamentally social.
In my experience, the earliest adopters of microsharing tools are technically savvy people who were already having these conversations, just not as easily or with as strong of results. They were the ones on their phones, on email discussion lists, in bulletin boards, or talking it up with the people in their physical proximity. Twitter (or her enterprise counterparts) didn't spawn this behavior. People seeking the next great aha-erlebnis weren't the wall flowers who kept to themselves. They were social enough already to know they did their best when engaged with other people. These tools just harnessed their focus, gave them a single user interface, and a question from which to launch from.
"What are you doing?" gave way to, "What have you learned today other people should know about?" "Anyone know the answer to my question?" and "Check out this research. It has the potential to change the way we work."
Q: Will these super short messages that some people write so frequently open us up to litigation?
A: Enterprise microsharing doesn't introduce new legal issues. Whenever an employee shares information, there is the possibility of leaking sensitive information or financial data that wasn't suppose to get out. The issues of most enterprise 2.0 tools are the same issues and concerns raised when we saw email leaving our servers for the first time. When we're communicating about things that matter, people have a tendency to become personal. What creates emotional nearness can also be construed as too private for correspondence of any length.
If you're part of an industry like securities and exchange that must maintain records of all correspondence, you'll need to comply with regulations and capture these exchanges, too. If you're in a business that handles sensitive information, you likely have already implemented strong policies prohibiting people from sharing those details. If you suspect your people need to be reminded this is one more communications tool that can be abused, remind them of their responsibilities rather than blame the tool or ban it out of fear it will be the source of a problem.
Your company should have a list of policies regarding social media to ensure trade secrets remain secret, personal lives don't become public, financial information doesn't get advertised, and there are consequences clearly stated about using these tools for negative publicity. Make the conversation about how to communicate wisely and in line with the ethical standards you maintain for your company overall. If you seek specifics, Legal OnRamp has developed a Web 2.0 and The Law wiki for members of the legal community to focus on issues relevant to this space.
Q: Is social software going to unravel organizational systems?
A: Modern approaches that help people work and talk together don't replace organizational systems; they extend age-old arrangements of how people have self-organized throughout time.
As John Bordeaux explains, social media represents an affirmation of the organization as ecosystem. It introduces diverse voices into the value network and, along with organizational network analysis, reveals that every organization is more than the employees, and is best understood, examined, and managed as an ecosystem.
Yes, it challenges the hierarchical delivery of information we use to manage our work lives, but that is a challenge to hierarchy, not to organizational theory. And before you declare the death of hierarchy, consider that this is an artifact of our sociology. It will take more than twitter to reverse the anthropological and sociological imperatives of hierarchy. If anything, microsharing represents a different kind of organizational system, one based on knowledge, quality and timeliness of data, and subjective merit.
Poet Brian Andreas could have been writing about the short bursts of information shared when he wrote, "These are little scraps of magic & when you paste them together you get a memory of something fine & strong."
Have a questions you'd like me to answer? Ask here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia
It's time to review the new set of skills people of all ages require to succeed.
After my son told me recently he couldn't find one of his favorite books and that I should, "order another one online," he climbed into my office chair and set his hands on my laptop keyboard as if to suggest he would show me how if I needed his help. The novel part of this exchange was that he had just turned four years old -- and he hasn't bought anything (that I know of) online.
If the saying, "It wasn't like this in my day" has become cliché, it still rung true as I began to reflect on the other parts of boy wonder's childhood that will be wildly different from my own... and that perhaps I ought to be learning even more from him.
Children are natural creators, circulators, connectors and collaborators, and now that technology is a part of their lives because it's part of the conversations around them (even if they don't watch TV, play video games or work online) they are becoming participants rather than simple consumers of the complex world they inhabit. At very young ages even, especially in households like mine where computer devices are frequent fixtures, children are developing a new literacy beyond reading and writing, from one of individual expression to social involvement.
The New Media Literacy center at MIT lists the following eleven skills necessary in this new world, and I circle back to those as the über set of skills for all of us, no matter our age.
The new skills include:
1. Play: the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving.
2. Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.
3. Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.
4. Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.
5. Multitasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
6. Distributed cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.
7. Collective intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.
8. Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.
9. Transmedia navigation: The ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.
10. Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.
11. Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
Denise Tayloe of online privacy advocacy group, Privo, reminds us that online we're creating a permanent public record of ourselves, and who amongst us wants to re-read (let alone share with others) the notes we passed or diaries we kept when we were young. She suggests there ought to be one more new media skill.
12. Awareness: the capacity to mindfully see one's self in the context of the larger world where people's interests are not always compatible with one's physical and emotional safety.
These new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research and technical skills, and critical analysis hopefully addressed in each classroom and every home.
Our goals should be to encourage children and youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary society.
Why stop there or then, though? These literacies should be addressed when organizations develop new programs for their knowledge workers. They ought to be considered when hiring someone for a job. They must be part of the enterprise social media conversation as a way to look at the gaps our cultures have between current practices and the organizations we need to become.
How would you rate yourself with these skills? How are you helping those around you strengthen their skills?
For more on this theme visit sites like Zoey’s Room, a website to help tween girls find the fun side of science and technology. Check out the blog of Izzy Neis about online communities, entertainment, kid empowerment, and online safety. And by all means, look around you. The opportunities are endless for us to become stronger, more skilled and more literate.
