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.
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.
Social Leadership is a style fit for the Social Age: it’s about building social authority, reputation based leadership that is consensual by the community. It’s complimentary to formal leadership but vital at a time when formal authority delivers a diminished return.
In this podcast Julian talks about the Six Tenets that any Social Leader will adhere to: These are: Be Curious, Try-Learn-Try, Share, Be Humble, Tell Stories, Be Fair and Protect.
