Transform Corporate Learning

for the Era of Collaboration

______________________________________________________________________
by Jay Cross
Internet TIme Lab

SAMPLE WHITE PAPER

Companies commission Internet Time Lab to write white papers
and produce webinars for a host of reasons.
In this case, a vendor of virtual meeting software asked us to
make the case that today's corporate training is out of step with
the times. Our fee for research, two original white papers, and
publicity was $10,000.

Internet TIme Lab, sample white paper!

The Twenty-First Century Corporation

Businesses around the world are transforming into extended enterprise
networks but their training departments are stuck in the previous century.
In the pursuit of trying to fix whats broken, lets imagine what ideal
corporate learning would look like if we could start over from scratch.
In the 1800s and 1900s, successful companies ran like well-oiled
machines. Workers were mere cogs in those machines. The people
were interchangeable parts. Companies paid them to follow instructions
and do the same thing over and over again.
Workers have since replaced machines as the primary means of
creating value. Companies rely on them to solve problems, delight
customers, and stay ahead of the game. They are what make a business
go and grow. A companys market value echoes the ingenuity, know-how
and reputation of its people.
Twenty-first century employees have to do complex, unpredictable work.
They have to keep up with a torrent of new products and services, not
just their own but also their competitors. They have to stay sharp in a
world thats going ever faster. They have to grapple with a barrage of
new information and demands on their time. Continuous learning is the
only way they can keep up. Their work has become learning, and
learning is the bulk of their work.
And, on top of this, technology has connected the world, making it
possible to connect with just about anyone, anytime, anywhere. The
ease of sharing of information has lead to a cultural phenomenon, which
relates to our topic at hand; people are used to being able to get the
answers to their questions to learn of their own accord through
research and conversation. But this way of learning autonomous
searching and social collaboration has not yet been reflected in
corporate learning, demonstrating that corporate learning has fallen
behind.
To keep things simple in our following exploration of how corporate
learning needs to change, lets call the industrial-age (old school)
companies Hierarchical and the network-era (2012) companies
Collaborative. Control in Hierarchical companies resides at the top.
Orders and instructions are pushed down through the organization.
Control in Collaborative companies is distributed throughout the

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organizations. Workers and supervisors have a large say in what they do

and they pull in the resources they need for themselves.
So, imagine the training department just disappeared because our
organization has shifted from Hierarchical to Collaborative, and learning
has become everyones business.
Where should we focus to improve learning? Its a matter of people and
infrastructure.

PEOPLE
Whos going to be involved?

Every Kind of Employee Temps Included

In the Hierarchical organization, employees were the only people who
received corporate training. Aside from compliance training and new
product introductions, most training focused on novices either newhires who needed orientation or workers mastering a new skill or subject.
Its not that seasoned and elder employees werent learning; we all learn
all the time. Rather, they werent learning as well as they might. HR and
training departments overlooked experienced employees because they
learn experientially, from stretch assignments and mentors rather than
from courses and workshops. Learning by experienced employees was
left to chance.
Two out of three Chief Learning Officers neglect experienced
employees, but these are the very people who make money for the
company. New hires and novices arent very productive. Raise their
proficiency by 20 percent and next to nothing hits the bottom line.
Raising the proficiency of top performers by 20 percent can double the
bottom line. A wise Collaborative organization focuses its efforts where
theyll have the most impact.

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Pre-employees and alumni

Talent managers advocate pre-employment training and internships. As
an example, they encourage college students with an interest in banking
to participate in bank training and perhaps work at the bank during
summer break to see if they enjoy it. The bank gains a leg up in
recruiting and knows more about job candidates before making an offer.
On the other hand, many former employees remain loyal to their firms,
and sometimes even provide leads for new business. Andersen
Consulting, IBM, and Goldman Sachs pay attention to so called
outboarding as well as onboarding. They have set up social networks
for alumni and help them keep up with new developments. Many alumni
are future customers.

The Extended Enterprise

The Extended Enterprise

We need to start thinking of businesses as extended enterprises,
especially when it comes to learning, because really, each business
includes distributors, suppliers, temps, partners, contractors, and,
importantly, customers as well, all in addition to employees.

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Michael Porters concept of the value chain taught us that the values and
costs generated by your suppliers and distributors are passed along to
your customers. Since learning improves performance, its in your
interest to help these people learn to do better work.

Customers and prospects

An educated customer is the best customer, said retailer Sy Sims. Colearning with customers may be learnings new frontier.
Google is teaching people to use more of its services in online courses.
Google could have produced a slick, buttoned-down, tech-oriented
training program, like they did for Google Wave, but this time around,
Google chose a friendly, avuncular fellow to lead you through the ondemand session. Hes not a salesperson; hes a research scientist, a
true-blue Googler! He gives encouragement: youre on the path to being
a Power Searcher! Hes casual, very approachable and looks like hes
talking to you from his living room. He stumbles occasionally. He comes
across as authentic, the type of guy youd enjoy talking to at a bar.
By doing this, Google is building customer loyalty. Co-learning builds
trust. As other companies realize the potential of learning as a marketing
tool, were going to see a lot more programs like this.
Help your customers become better at serving their own needs. Beyond
that, learning with one another forges of trust and goodwill. Co-learning
adapting to the future with customers is an unexploited marketing
strategy.

Who should control learning?

People are at their best when theyre doing things for themselves, when
they pull what they need rather than have things pushed on them.
Hierarchies work well when the future is predictable and things arent
prone to change. The objective in a stable situation is to get better at
what youre currently doing. Organizations develop programs, training
among them, that promote conformity.
Collaborative organizations outpace hierarchies when the future is
unpredictable and change is rampant. The objective in a dynamic
situation is to get better at whatever comes along. Wise organizations
develop platforms with standard interfaces to maintain flexibility and
spark innovation. These organizations give workers a say in what they

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learn and how they learn it. They provide a variety of means of for
workers to get the information they need. Instead of rigid training
sessions, the organization supplies a platform that nurtures self-directed
learning.
Companies accomplish the transition from Hierarchy to Collaborative by
handing over more control to those that are closest to the customer. This
may seem radical, and change can be unsettling, but this is a key to
becoming a Collaborative organization.

How self-directed learners learn

When given the choice most workers prefer to learn from experience.
Experiential learning takes place in the course of trying to accomplish
something, often by mimicking what other people do, by trial and error,
and by asking colleagues and experts; this means experiential learning
is often informal learning, done outside of the classroom. Mentors and
coaches give assignments that provide new challenges and therefore
require learning.
Conversation is the most important learning technology ever invented.
People love to talk with each other. Conversations have magic to them.
Look at a written transcript of a conversation and it sounds incoherent.;
true conversation is a mix of empathy, emotion, body language, shared
understanding, nuance, and cultural norms. Conversations are the stem
cells of learning. Improve the availability and quality of conversation, and
you automatically improve the amount of learning taking place.
A survey last year asked managers how they learned their jobs. Informal
chats with colleagues ranked #1, followed by Internet search, and trial
and error. Workers value social learning (collaboration, networking, and
conversations) and informal learning (community membership, Internet
search, blogs, curated content, and self-study). Both social and informal
are deemed more important by employees than company documents
and training.1
Jane Hart offers great advice on how to design a learning ecology to
match the way contemporary workers learn. Its no longer about

The Learning Habits of Leaders and Managers, June 2012.

Downloaded from http://goodpractice.com/blog/resources/discover-the-learning-habits-of-leaders-andmanagers

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delivering courses in training rooms.2 Here are some tips from Jane on
this subject.

Think activities, not courses.

Think learning space/places, not training rooms.
Think lightweight design, not instructional design.
Think continuous flow of activities, not just respond to need.
Think social technologies, not training technologies.

Generations
Digital Natives are the generation that grew up glued to computer
screens. For them, networks and technology are second nature.
Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo says that by the time the average
boy reaches the age of 21, he has spent at least 10,000 hours playing
video games. This alternative reality rewires their brains. Theyre
accustomed to living in a highly stimulating environment where they are
in control. Their world is made up of decision making, researching and
collaborating all at the click of a button, anytime, anywhere, so they
wont put up with traditional training which says what they will learn and
when. If Digital Natives arent allowed to act, they will refuse to play the
game.
Digital Immigrants are those who grew up before interactive computing
took hold. Some are in denial, trying to get by without going digital; they
will become fossils. Elders who do want to join the Network Era have an
opportunity to barter with the Digital Natives, something called reversementoring. Immigrants swap their organizational savvy and deep smarts
for the Natives help in using technology.
The learnscape, that overall platform on which learning takes place,
must accommodate both Natives and Immigrants. It must be easy to
access and understand. It must let people take control of their learning
and participate actively.

Supporting the Social Workplace Learning Continuum by Jane Hart, 4 June 2012. http://
www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2012/06/04/supporting-the-social-workplace-learning-continuum/

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INFRASTRUCTURE
Technological infrastructure for social learning
Work and learning are converging, and as this change happens, the
infrastructure of the old corporate learning must go things like
traditional one-size-fits-all in-person training seminars. In its place enters
social and informal learning hubs like on-demand content, live online
discussions, wikis and forums, and searchable content archives. The
great news is that social and informal learning dont require new systems
because learning can take place on the same platform as the existing
social network, if a company already has one.
The primary thing to bear in mind, says MITs Andy McAfee (McAfee), is
INATT. Thats short for a phrase that kept coming up in conversation
when he was writing Enterprise 2.0. Its short for Its Not About The
Technology. People come first.
But you cant do without the technology either. Social networks are the
ideal platform for the new corporate learning, so lets briefly examine
how they support corporate learning.
Social computing
Early personal computing was based on corporate computing.
Conventions like ASCII, programming languages, Internet protocol, and
encryption were developed for corporate mainframe computers and only
later adopted for personal computers. That situation has flip-flopped.
Innovations in applications and user-interface design are born on the
consumer side and migrate to the enterprise.
Forbes named Salesforce.com the worlds most innovative company.
Where did that innovation come from? Salesforce.com says cloud-based
Customer Relationship Management application borrowed heavily from
Amazon. Salesforce.coms social network application was inspired by
Facebook. Salesforce.coms Chatter began its life as in-house Twitter.
As the web turns social, Salesforce.com has changed its mission to
leading the shift to the Social Enterprise, and thats where its proving
its forward-thinking nature.
So how do you find the right social platform to enhance your corporate
training program? When an organization is improving its workscape,
looking at consumer applications is a good way to think about whats
required in the corporate space. Ask net-savvy younger workers how

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they would like to learn new skills, and they bring up the features they
enjoy outside of work:

A personal profile so I can share information with my connections

A personalized experience and recommendations, like Amazon
Connections to friends and colleagues, like Facebook and
LinkedIn
Activity streams, like Twitter, so I know whats going on and what
people are talking about
Face-to-face interaction and desktop sharing through video
conferencing
Multiple access options, like a bank that offers access by ATM,
the Web, phone, or human tellers
A diverse learning library, made up of videos, FAQs and links to
relevant information
Single sign-on access, like using my LinkedIn profile to access
other programs
Choosing and subscribing to streams of information Im interested
in
Provide a single, simple, all-in-one interface, like that provided by
Google
Make it easy to share photos and video, as on Flickr and YouTube
Leverage the wisdom of crowds, by allowing me to pose a
question to my connections
Enable users to rate content that they liked the most or found the
most helpful

Minimum viable workscape

What were talking about is a social work hub where every employee and
external partner can come to collaborate, share information, get
information and provide updates and ask questions. When it comes time
to build your new collaborative and social learning center, some of those
consumer applications are simple to replicate in-house. Others are not.
You probably cant afford, and definitely dont need, to create your own
Facebook or Google behind your firewall. There are lots of applications
you can implement at reasonable cost. Be skeptical if your collaborative
infrastructure doesnt include these minimal functions:
Profiles so each employee can personally connect to the
network. Profile should contain photo, position, location, email
address, expertise (tagged so its searchable). Nice-to-haves
include how to reach you (noting whether youre online now),
reporting chain (boss, bosss boss, etc.), link to your blog and

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bookmarks, people in your network, links to documents you

frequently share, members of your network.
Workspaces to break up the organizations activity into
relevant, digestible feeds for each individual and feeds.
Workspaces are networks within the organization that are created
by employees to gather a team or group in a specific area. For
example, new hires that are brought on at the same time, may
create a workspace where they can ask each other questions and
share information that they find out.
Activity stream - for monitoring the organization pulse in real
time, sharing what youre doing, being referred to useful
information, asking for help, accelerating the flow of news and
information, and keeping up with change. Activity streams should
be available for the company at large and for workspaces.
Wikis or notes - for writing collaboratively, eliminating multiple
versions of documents, sharing information with a relevant group,
eliminating unnecessary email, and sharing responsibility for
updates and error correction.
Integrated virtual meetings - to make it easy to meet online,
because there needs to be room in your learning program for
group discussion and application. Minimum feature set: shared
screen, text chat, video conferencing streams.
Mobile access - Half of Americas workforce works away from the
office at least sometimes. Smart phones are surpassing PCs for
connecting to networks for access and participation. People post
more Tweets via phone than via computers. Google designs its
apps for mobile before porting them to PCs. What does all of this
mean? Your new social workscape needs to be mobile so people
can collaborate from anywhere.

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Putting a learning platform in place

When its time to put a learning platform in place, its a good idea to
make a company wide commitment to your new philosophy on learning.
Heres an example from a company I recently worked with:

We are open and transparent.

We narrate our work. Need to share.

We offer live, on-demand training content as a part of

continuous learning.

We value conversation as a learning vehicle.

We make our work accessible to others.

We are a vanguard of change within the company.

Our bottom line is business success.

We know learning is work; work is learning.

We are a learning organization.

We value time for self-development and reflection.

We recognize that reflection is a key to learning.

Changing behavior requires continual reinforcement, so be ready to

tackle the concern and resistance that some people may have toward
becoming a more collaborative organization.
A great way to embrace your new collaborative nature while helping
people adapt to it, is to host all-hands virtual meetings to share your
process toward becoming a collaborative organization. Make your
employees a part of the evolution; keep them in the loop.

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Learning Networks
Networks are not only the environment of learning; theyre also the place
where problems are solved, discoveries are made, and new knowledge
is created.

This way of looking at learning platforms builds on the work

of Harold Jarche and the Internet Time Alliance.

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Workers are members of multiple, interconnected networks.

Learning Network

Primary Activity

Personal Network

Connecting

Work Team

Collaboration

Communities of
Practice
Company Social
Network

Cooperation

The Internet

Currency

Extended Enterprise

Coherence

Coordination

Conversations
about...
Discovery, sharing, &
personal
Projects, co-creation
Common interests,
new developments
Company-wide activity
feed, locator,
knowledge store
Diverse opinions,
news, pointers, the
Commons
Co-learning keeps all
on the same
wavelength

Everyone has personal face-to-face networks: the friends, neighbors,

colleagues, and acquaintances we talk with. Most people have electronic
personal networks, too: Facebook, discussions groups, and a variety of
followers and followed comrades. We rely on our networks to help us
learn whats going on in our worlds. The collaborative organization may
replicate those personal connections through social work platforms with
customizable workspaces. Each workspace is for a group of connected
people teams, departments, project contributors, and so on.
Communities are networks of people who share common interests and
identify themselves as cohorts. A community may be a group of
professionals (e.g. chefs or chip designers) or people with shared
passions (e.g. model railroaders and cyclists) or co-workers from
different work teams (e.g. the United Way Committee or neighborhood
watch). Communities share knowledge (Heres a great recipe for
crayfish with foie gras), help one another (Theres an opening for a
sous-chef at the Fish Trap in Key West), validate best practices (Use
coddled eggs in Caesar salad to avoid salmonella), and develop
apprentices into professionals (My salad chef is ready to become a
pastry chef). Communities can exist internally (the United Way
Committee) or externally (the chefs). Innovation in Silicon Valley is
enhanced when competitors share trade secrets because allegiance to

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their professional community (Were chip designers) is strong than to

their employer (I work for AMD.)
Many companies enable workers to establish a personal node in the
companys social platform. This is where your individual profile enables
people to find you, know what your good at, and share things you may
be interested in. Many workers narrate their work on individual blogs.
Transparency builds trust.
Most information work is carried out by project teams. When team
members are unable to meet in the same physical space, they rely on
networks to collaborate on getting projects done. Team members who
work together, learn together. In time, team members develop strong
social ties, trust emerges, and they co-create new knowledge and
innovation. Experience is the best teacher and work teams are where it
happens.
Project Teams have a job to do; communities come together to
cooperate and share for the good of the group. Project teams inevitably
need to acquire knowledge from outside their small circle. Their
individual members are often members of several communities, which
they tap for knowledge and guidance. A smart organization supports its
internal teams and encourages its people to take part in external teams.
Many progressive companies have set up social work platforms that
connect all employees to an activity feed that lists activities and pointers
from all over the company. Social workspaces are the ultimate silo
busters, enabling everyone to be on the same page, accelerating the
organizations cycle time, and letting the company know what the
company knows.3

Former HP CEO Lew Platt, If only HP knew what HP knows, wed be three times more productive.

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A Note About Internet Access

Many companies signal their lack of trust in their employees by denying
them access to the greatest assembly of knowledge in the history of
humanity, the Internet. To be consistent, they should probably take away
their telephones (They might make long distance calls to China!) and
pencils (They might waste time playing tic-tac-toe). Bad apples are going
to do bad things with or without the Internet, but by hoarding access to
the web, youre not only punishing your good apples, but also hindering
their ability to learn.
For many people today, working without the net is equivalent to working
blindfolded. When companies deny access to the net, employees route
around them with smartphones and tablets that bypass corporate IT. The
price of criminalizing access to the net is lower morale, the message that
its okay to break rules (wink, wink), and to give up on hiring the best and
the brightest (who will work somewhere they are trusted to act like
responsible citizens). Companies should encourage workers to connect
to the outside world, for thats where the customers are.
The Internet is an essential library of information for todays workforce.
David Weinberger points out that the web has changed the nature of
knowledge itself. Knowledge that was once limited to what you could
print on a page is now connected to all manner of evidence, counterclaims, elaboration, and interpretations.
The basic idea is that the properties of knowledge that we've
taken for granted at least in the West for, oh, 2,500 years are not
actually properties of knowledge. They're properties of knowledge
when its medium is paper. And when you remove the paper and
put things online, it takes on the properties of its new mediumof
the Internet. Importantly, knowledge in a network includes
differences and disagreements in a way that traditional knowledge
is uncomfortable with. Everything is unsettled, everything is
argued about, and very few things are ever totally resolved on the
Net.4
Theres a word for companies that deny workers access to the riches of
the Internet. That word is stupid.

What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age?

A conversation with David Weinberger about facts, fiction and forecasts. Scientific American, November
29, 2011. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age

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Is your organization ready?

How ready are you to tackle Big L Learning? Where does your
organization fit on the spectrum from Hierarchical Organization to
Collaborative Organization?
Our employees can access the entire Internet from their desktops.
yes no
Our people are learning fast enough to keep up with the future.
yes no
Anyone can set up an online meeting at our company. yes no
We take time to reflect on our experience. yes no
We distribute information through podcasts, blogs, or videos. yes
no
Its easy to contribute to a blog or wiki. yes no
My team talks about the trends that drive our business. yes no
Relationships between departments are collaborative and effective.
yes no
We learn something from every interaction with a customer. yes
no
If you checked fewer than five yes boxes, your organization is trailing
the mainstream.

Benefits
Assessing the cost/benefit of experiential learning is like asking for a
cost/benefit of your telephone connections. You cant live without it. As
one pundit put it, The ROI of social networking is being in business a
few years from now.

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Among the potential benefits of providing a world-class learning function

to workers and throughout the extended enterprise are:

Better, more knowledgable customer service

Faster response time
Higher morale
Reduced turnover
More flexibility
More effective supply chain
Bottom-up innovation
Collective intelligence
Build upon one anothers expertise
Recruit superior candidates

A CFO will point out that these are intangibles. Shes right. But most of
the value of companies is intangible. In the two decades of the 20th
century, the value of the S&P 500 companies flipped from 80% tangibles
to 80% intangibles.
Stock price reflects the value investors put on know-how, brand, track
record, and the likelihood that the company will continue to create value
in the future. All of these depend on the quality of the workforce and its
relationships, and those in turn depend on peoples ability to learn and
grow.
More than one thousand CEOs around the world told IBM these were
the most important factors for success5:

Those characteristics describe the ideal corporate learning infrastructure

for a Collaborative Organization as well.

Global CEO Study, IBM, http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/ceostudy2012/

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SUMMARY
To keep things simple, we began by dividing the world into two
types of businesses. We call industrial-age (old school) companies
Hierarchical and network-era (2012) companies Collaborative.
1.

2.

Control in Hierarchical companies resides at the top. Orders

and instructions are pushed down through the organization.
Hierarchical organizations train employees. Hierarchical
organizations micromanage: they tell people what to learn.
Control in Collaborative companies is distributed throughout
the organization. Workers and supervisors have a large say
in what they do. Collaborative organizations help everyone
in the extended enterprise learn: contractors, temps,
partners, consultants and customers. Collaborative
organizations give managers and workers the freedom to
choose how they learn to do the work. This experiential
learning is deeper and more long-lasting than classes.

What if our company has shifted from Hierarchical to

Collaborative? Learning would become everyones business. We
looked at likely changes. We asked what would give us the biggest
bang in a Collaborative Organization if we didnt even have a
training department.
A good way to assess the adequacy of the technology youre going
to rely on is to look at capabilities on the consumer web. Facebook
has taught hundreds of millions of people about social networking.
Ask net-savvy younger workers how they would like to learn new
skills, and they bring will up the features they enjoy outside of
work.
We provided a checklist for assembling a collaborative learning
infrastructure. Its not just about the technology, so we examined
also some of the human aspects of implementation, including the
rationale for different sorts of social networks.
Are you ready? We suggest you answer our nine brief questions to
assess where your organization is on the journey from Hierarchical
to Collaborative. Do it online and well post the average scores on
the web.

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Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He is CEO and Chief Unlearning
Officer of Internet Time Alliance, which helps corporations and governments use
networks to accelerate performance. He writes white papers, articles, speeches,
strategies, and books.
Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the
first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. The world authority
on informal learning, Jays calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He
was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on
Informal Learning.
Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, high in the hills a dozen miles east of
the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from the University. People visit the Lab
to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.

About Internet TIme Lab

The Internet Time Lab advises organizations how to get their people learning, working,
and innovating in Internet time. We write white papers and articles for vendors and
ventures in the educational renaissance.Our words persuade people to take action.
This white paper was commissioned by Citrix Onlne in Fall 2012. They are great people to work with.

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