Social Artistry at Work

Social tools are changing not only the way that professionals are working and learning but also the way that organisations are transforming into social businesses. In the new connected workplace, current training, e-learning or blended learning services, which take a top-down, "command and control" approach to organising and managing "learning" will not be appropriate to support these new ways of working and learning. What will be required is a completely new range of services - which we might call non-training services - that are focused on supporting continuous performance improvement and learning in the workflow as people do their jobs.

Social learning is not what you make people do (as in training) - but something that happens naturally and spontaneously every day - at work as well as at home. Social learning is the lifeblood of all businesses. Social learning is a natural process - you can encourage it but you can't (en)force it. Social media can only help to support and enhance it. The presence of social media doesn't necessarily mean social learning will take place. With social learning it's about thinking how to support it as it happens naturally and continuously - not how you can create, design, deliver and manage it. Since we learn socially all the time the best social learning platform in the workplace is the one you already use for collaborative working - this might be a social intranet but it might also be some other social tool or network - but it's not a learning platform/management system that traps knowledge and experiences in a system separate from, and outside of the workflow. Social learning is not about "plan and organise " to "command and control" - but about "encourage and support" to "connect and collaborate" Supporting social learning means helping to build the framework for conversations and discussions around team and group activities. You can't train people to be social or how to learn socially - you can only show people how to work and learn collaboratively.  It means a mindshift from a focus on shaping (training) to modelling (coaching). The most successful social learning stories are coming not from the ad hoc use of social media in e-learning or classroom training - but from organisations that are supporting more effective learning in the workflow via sharing of knowledge and experiences as part of the everyday work. Since most social learning in an organisation takes place outside of training (the formal, structured organised, learning that takes place in classrooms or in online courses) - in the flow or work, if you are n

Micro-blogging - to truly become effective whether personally or organizationally - ought to become both a personal and an organizational habit.

Harold Jarche moves us away from the subject expert label to a broader definition where you are skilled in participating in networks,. I think that evolution speaks directly to the key elements of the social artistry skill set. So the critical skills for people formerly known as SME's are how to become contributing members of subject matter networks. Part of this is in narrating one's work and learning. I have called personal knowledge management (PKM) - our part of the social learning contract. One cannot be effective in professional networks without contributing. Subject matter networks are made up of many contributors. A key skill is in weaving the best networks together.

So, since people learn from one another as a consequence of working together,  rather than focusing exclusively on the learning, I think it is about helping them work collaboratively and enabling learning to take place as part of that process. There is then no need to isolate the "learning" to try and track  it, its effectiveness can be measured in terms of the changes in job, team and business performance that take place. And all this happens due to good working relationships,  as well as from practice, from shared experiences, and from all sorts of other interactions that lead to rich collaborative experiences.

You could add the tagline - life is learning, and learning is life - to Seth Godin's comprehensive piece on the state of public schooling, Stop Stealing Dreams.

Are you on Facebook? Who isn't these days? Here's a question about using Facebook as an extension of work or classroom learning. Is it ethical to force people (over whom you have some power & authority) to use Facebook, a proprietary platform that tracks users & sells their data to third parties?