I’ve been working with a diverse group of Learning professionals in Madrid today, exploring the Social Age and the ways in which learning has evolved. I sketched this up with a small group, to capture the narrative of ‘what learning is about in the Social Age’ and share it now, not really as a finished or polished framework, but rather in the spirit of #WorkingOutLoud.
Each of our individual Learning Landscapes is different: we come with different knowledge, context, ability, and motivation, amongst a host of broader pressures. I thought it was worth exploring a few of these: my motivation being that, as we consider Organisational imperatives and contexts of learning design and delivery, it’s all too easy to forget that learning is, at least at point of consumption, always grounded in the individual.
The pace of change in Organisational approaches to learning is being far outstripped by evolutions in the reality of learning itself. In the Social Age, technology allows us to access knowledge, and make sense of it, ever faster, and more collaboratively, than before. Today, I want to share some thoughts on four aspects of this change: the rapid iterations of our individual approaches to learning, the rapid diversification of learning support technologies, the evolution of knowledge itself, and the fragmentation of the underlying power that sits behind learning.
To be curious is to inquisitive as to what lies beyond the horizon of our own ignorance and understanding. It’s a primary driver of human nature, a strong motivator into action, and gets us in equal measure into hot water or cold. As we seek to unlock (or unblock) curiosity within our Organisations, we should be aware of what fosters it, where it sits, what it provokes, and where the consequences may take us.
I’ve been working with a diverse group of Learning professionals in Madrid today, exploring the Social Age and the ways in which learning has evolved. I sketched this up with a small group, to capture the narrative of ‘what learning is about in the Social Age’ and share it now, not really as a finished or polished framework, but rather in the spirit of #WorkingOutLoud.
Sticks and stones may break bones, but words are, allegedly, harmless. Or maybe not. There can be a violence in communication, not an act of physical aggression, but aggression nonetheless. The violence of vitriol, carefully constructed to cause pain. I was struck by this in a conversation about change, a conversation that moved to blame, fault, and tribalism.
When the banks collapsed in the last financial crisis, there was a phrase bandied about, that some were ‘too big to fail’. This week i’ve been pondering something of the opposite: are some organisations ‘too big to succeed’. I’m not thinking specifically of their headcount, their geographical spread, or the physical weight of their buildings, but rather more the radical complexity of their networks, the unknowable nature of their knowledge, and the sheer inertia of their formal hierarchies. Possibly good organisations, probably doing good work, but ultimately doomed to fail through their inability to understand their true dynamics.
The idea that Social Learning is somehow separate from other types of learning is a misnomer. For me, it represents simply the ownership of, and engagement, with the learning story. ‘Formal Learning’ is a story written by the organisation, and distributed to people: it’s ideal where you need consistency, conformity, where you are trying to build a codified strength, but it lack the context of practice, of local understanding, and often has no space for individual interpretation.
Trees grow, and we can nurture that growth. They are part of a wider ecosystem, and both contribute to the health of that system, and rely upon the overall connectivity of it. They are cyclical, and carry their growth as rings. Trees both burst into blossom, but also shed their leaves, in annual cycles of renewal, and that is a central theme of Social Leadership, which i address at the very first stage, ‘Curation’. We do not choose our space forever, we choose a foundation to build upon. I like the idea that some leaves we shed, and some just get blown away as we are battered by the wind. But overall, it’s a continual cycle of growth, shedding, and renewal.
We are relocating from a space of certainty, to a place of doubt: our domain based Organisations, with the systems of education that feed them, and the markets that sustain them, all evolving. This is not a time for answers, but rather a time for questions, and to consider the mechanisms of sense making that will help us to ask the right ones.
