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The easiest way to control and encourage these communities is to sponsor them within the corporation itself. “Brown-bag” lunches and meet-the-expert days are some examples of ways organizations are formally tapping into what used to be an ineffective and costly method of learning.

Most learning doesn't occur during formal training programs. It happens through processes not structured or sponsored by an employer or a school. Informal learning is the term I use to describe what happens the rest of the time.

To truly understand the learning in your organization you might want to recognize the informal learning already taking place and put in practices to cultivate and capture more of what people learn. This includes strategies for improving learning opportunities for everyone and tactics for managing and sharing what you know.

Often, the most valuable learning takes place serendipitously, by random chance.

Formal learning includes the hierarchically structured school system that runs from primary school through the university and organized school-like programs created in business for technical and professional training. Informal learning describes a lifelong process whereby individuals acquire attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative influences and resources in his or her environment, from family and neighbors, from work and play, from the market place, the library and the mass media. Intentional learning is the process whereby an individual aims to learn something and goes about achieving that objective. Accidental learning happens when in everyday activities an individual learns something that he or she had not intended or expected.

reading journals or magazines, reading book(s), talking with experts, talking with peers, email or other written correspondence, and through a coach or mentor.

"Still think learning means school? Expand your definition of learning to include conversations with your peers and your children, from books, articles, informal networks, Internet searching, television, and what you learn through trial and error. Use everything that happens in your world as a resource to learn more now." Learn More Now, Informally. Marcia L. Conner, May 2005.

Real learning, the kind of “aha!” moment that signals the brain has connected the dots, is an absolutely wondrous and amazing mystery. It involves memory, synapses, endorphins, and encoding, and, more often than not, those accidental and serendipitous moments we call informal learning.

Informal learning is what goes on around our formal learning process.

Formal learning happens when knowledge is captured and shared by people other than the original expert or owner of that knowledge. The knowledge can be captured in any format—written, video, audio—as long as it can be accessed anytime and anywhere, independent from the person who originally had it. Examples of such formal knowledge transfer include live virtual-classroom courses with prepared slides, self-paced off-the-shelf instructional CBT courses, books, video- and audiotapes, team rooms in which documents are stored, digital libraries and repositories, a real-time seminar on the Web (or webinar), electronic performance-support tools, programs accessed during a job or task, instructor- led courses that follow an outline, repeatable lecture labs, a recorded Web-based meeting, or even e-mails that can be forwarded. Formal learning often requires prerequisites, pre- and post-assessments, tests, and grades, and it sometimes results in certification. It is often presented by an instructor, and attendance and outcomes are tracked.

Informal learning is what happens when knowledge has not been externalized or captured and exists only inside someone’s head. To get at the knowledge, you must locate and talk to that person. Examples of such informal knowledge transfer include instant messaging, a spontaneous meeting on the Internet, a phone call to someone who has information you need, a live one-time-only sales meeting introducing a new product, a chat-room in real time, a chance meeting by the water cooler, a scheduled Web-based meeting with a real-time agenda, a tech walking you through a repair process, or a meeting with your assigned mentor or manager.

We all need that kind of access to an expert who can answer our questions and with whom we can play with the learning, practice, make mistakes, and practice some more.

If we want to become smarter companies, we need to encourage informal learning. We need to create what I have been calling collaborative learning environments, where we seamlessly knit together formal and informal learning. We need to use technology to facilitate the informal as well as the formal transfer of knowledge by including expert locators, e-mail connections with instructors, real-time Internet meeting places, virtual-learning support groups, instant messaging, expert networks, mentor and coaching networks, personal e-learning portals, moderated chats, and more. We need to start taking advantage of the tools and technology that exist today and those coming online tomorrow. We need to create the 100 percent learning solution, in which the proscribed formal learning events and the serendipitous learning moments are given equal value. Formal learning is only the beginning of the challenge, not the end.

To illustrate the difference between formal and informal learning, let’s consider the game of golf. If you want to learn to play golf, you can go to a seminar, read a book about the history and etiquette of golf, watch a videotape of great golfing moments, and then you can say you know something about golf. But have you really learned to play golf?

From your first tee shot on your first hole, it takes hours of adopting and adapting, alone and in a foursome, in all sorts of weather and conditions. You discover what you know and can do, swing all the clubs, ask all sorts of questions, fail and succeed, practice and practice some more, before you have really learned to play golf. Real learning, then, is the state of being able to adopt and adapt what you know and can do—what you have acquired through formal learning—under a varying set of informal circumstances.

I call this the 75/25 Rule of Learning. We get only about 25 percent or less of what we use in our jobs through formal learning. Yet the majority of companies are currently involved only with the formal side of the continuum. Most of today’s investments in corporate education are on the formal side. The net result is that we spend the most money on the smallest part of the learning equation.

The other 75 percent of learning happens as we creatively adopt and adapt to ever changing circumstances.

We need to factor those accidental, informal intersections of learning and performance into the process.

We need to foster informal moments of knowledge transfer.

In the early days of the personal computer, we would all go to the same course to “learn” how to use an application or operating system, and then we would go back to our desks, usually with a thick how-to manual. The problem was that we never used those manuals. Instead, we found the local “power user,” the person who for one reason or another had spent more time playing with the computer, or had taken more courses, or had learned directly from an expert, and we began to pepper that person with phone calls and show up frequently at his or her doorway or cube entrance. Two things quickly became apparent. First, the power user was teaching what people had not managed to learn in the class, and second, the power user had learned how to use the PC in a very different way: what he or she showed you was often not the way it had been taught. But it was the time I spent huddled in front of the power user’s screen when I really learned the word processing and spreadsheet and graphics programs I needed in my work. My learning may have started in the course, but it ended in the huddle.

no formal mailboy-training program. I just walked around for an unspecified number of days with a senior mailboy, watching and learning, asking and listening. I was a young apprentice on the move. Then, one day, when I was deemed fit and ready, I walked around on my own. And if I had a question, I went over by the water cooler (yes, they did have them back then), where the mailroom su

Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going;

Mature learners, typically a company’s top performers, never show up for the bus. They want pointers that enable them to do things for themselves.

Informal learning is a profit strategy. Companies use it to: Improve knowledge worker productivity 20% - 30% Increase sales by Google-izing product knowledge Generate fresh ideas and increase innovation Transform an organization from near-bankruptcy to record profits Reduce stress, absenteeism, and healthcare costs Invest development resources where they will have the most impact Increase professionalism and professional growth Cut costs and improve responsiveness with self-service learning

Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.”

Knowledge workers thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do.

Images+words communicate twice as much as words alone. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age groups.

This informal, spontaneous, vernacular knowledge sharing is not just for surfers. Imagine having an in-house learning and information environment as rich as the internet. You’d have blogs and search and syndication and podcasts and more. You’d also have a platform just about everyone knows how to use. Some companies are already doing this

As work and learning become one, good learning and good work merge to become a single activity.

Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes.

On a parallel track, however, there's a growing recognition that valuable learning often takes place through informal learning. Informal learning is based in conversations, social interactions, and team projects, in which learning is part of the interactions between people.

Informal learning isn't limited to a predefined body of knowledge, but rather emerges from the interaction of people. At the heart of it is the transfer of tacit knowledge--knowledge that's not articulated but is acquired by individuals through experience.

Informal learningis based in conversations, social interactions, and team projects, in which learning is part and parcel of the interactions between people.

Through forming relationships, knowledge is diffused. He alludes to the image of the village square, where people hang out in a social space. That social space is the setting in which social relations are reinforced, trust is developed, and informal learning takes place. In sum, informal learning is that which allows the tacit knowledge resident in a group to emerge and be exchanged, sometimes by serendipity, sometimes in the course of accomplishing a specific project, through the construction of spaces that support learning.

Temporary learning systems: groups of people brought together for a short period of time to learn about a specific topic

Communities of practice: groups of people that share "ways of working" or professional or personal interests and who meet together to exchange knowledge and share resources