But beyond that, two very valuable bi-products of data visualization as they relate communities and communication, is the ability to illustrate the “missing data” and contextualize the information.

In 1901, early visualization of international communication had begun.  While these initial visualizations are certainly primitive, ultimately they prove valuable in illustrating bottlenecks in communications, key stakeholders in the networks and opportunities to improve and expand international communication (ie: missing data points).

Some 100 or so years later, Facebook recently provided a visualization of their network connections, as it relates to their growing user base of 500 million individuals.  As the map illustrates, international communication has improved dramatically, and in a very correlative way, so has technological innovation.

As the tools that enable one to one, as well as one to many communication evolve and break down “knowledge silos” it’s no wonder that the world wide adoption of these services have progressed so rapidly.  Consumers are hungry for knowledge, and eager to leverage the communication channels which allow them to tap into these knowledge reserves.

As these technologies have progressed,  they have fundamentally changed how people discover and disseminate knowledge; two components which are foundational to innovation and resourcefulness, regardless of industry or vertical.

But what is really to be drawn from this phenomenon isn’t the ability of “knowledge brokers” to communicate with one another, but in their new found ability to “visualize” where their resources lie and what connections they must tap into to access the information in need.

Internal Communications:

The inherent nimbleness of the consumer allows them to more quickly break down knowledge silos, reinvent their communication mediums, and create industries of innovation at amazing speeds.  The speed and magnitude of these innovations have left many businesses asking themselves “how can we do this too?”

But in order to answer this question, businesses must first ask themselves and understand “What tools, resources and knowledge do we currently have available to us?”

The graphic above illustrates a Social Network Analysis (SNA) of a company with teams working in five international locations.  In order for the teams to distribute information across the organization and promote innovation, they must first utilize this visualization of their organization to ask themselves a series of questions:

1 – How is information currently shared across networks?

2 – Who are the “knowledge brokers” in these networks?

3 – Where (and why) do “information bottlenecks” exist?

4 – What expertise exists in each isolated network?

5 – What tools can we implement to promote communication and knowledge sharing across networks?

6 – What does the ideal SNA look like for our organization, in order to fulfill our needs in innovation, collaboration, etc.?

As with many challenges posed to businesses, the first step is gaining a clear understanding of where one is starting from.  A visual analysis of an organization’s communication map allows them to tap into the “dark matter” necessary to leverage their employees’ knowledge, company resources and collaboration tools to their greatest potential.

The New York Times recently published this map which shows data searches where users jumped from journal to journal as part of the knowledge they were seeking.  What a great visual of knowledge networks in action…

What would a map of your workforce look like as they went after the knowledge they needed to do their job?  Does your current learning and development/training strategy support it?

Many organizations are recognizing that the picture above resembles how work gets done in their workforce and leveraging tools such as social or organizational network analysis and value network analysis to create a strategy to support these knowledge networks as ways of transferring knowledge, improving performance and increasing innovation.  How about yours?

CLO Media posted a recent executive briefing where they provide four things that CEOs and Chief Learning Officers [CLOs] should be considering when operating their business.  I agree with the categories listed in the article but they are quite high level (it is a ‘briefing’ for a reason I suppose) and allow the reader to determine how each would be executed.

For a CEO or CLO that is planning to ramp up efforts in these areas it provides an opportunity to do things a bit more progressively in implementation – examples provided as they relate to the four CLO suggestions…

1. Develop strategically with purpose: one of the snippets from this section is “have a clear definition of a desired future” – in today’s rapidly changing world it’s difficult to have a static vision of a future that will be the basis for processes and decisions implemented now; utilizing the process of scenario planning is a way to identify multiple futures (scenarios) and then determine the common denominators threaded throughout.  These common elements can then be used by the CLO to begin looking at high-level competencies that would be valuable regardless of which future the organization ends up living.
2. Focus on core competencies first: I would describe core competencies as those that will not be changing in the foreseeable future.  Competency development initiatives are often centered around the current state of the organization, market, product portfolio, etc.  All of those factors (plus many others) can change quickly and having competencies that will prevail through all conditions are what I would truly consider ‘core.’  Referring back to #1, scenario planning is a great way to plan for the competencies that will be crucial in many different settings.
3. Target opportunities intentionally instead of reacting to problems: reacting to problems often results in Band-Aid solutions that may mask symptoms for a few days, weeks or even years before they come back to haunt the original target or manifest themselves in a new way in a different part of the organization.  [A classic example is a company with lagging sales that launches a large price cut promotion and due to the diminished revenue from the price cut is unable to meet the demand generated by the promotion and now faces quality and customer service issues.]  An effective and progressive way of addressing this is by viewing the organization as a system – an interdependent collection of pieces where action in one area will result in consequences [good or bad] in another.  This approach is known as systems thinking and has yielded impressive results for organizations around the world – utilizing it provides a way to identify opportunities to tweak operations and model potential outcomes that would otherwise be left to chance.
4. Embrace change: harnessing incremental change and having a progressive approach to change management are certainly crucial but often challenging.  People are often creatures of habit and start to like that with which they become familiar.  So changing that can be difficult.  Utilizing a social network analysis is a powerful tool that provides an organizational x-ray showing how information is transferred around the network that comprises an organization.  Information from a network analysis can be used to identify people in the organization that are sought out most often – the influencers.  Utilizing these individuals in change management results in a much more targeted effort to managing change than the traditional shotgun approach.

As I mentioned above, the tenets offered in the original briefing by CLO Media are valid ones and their high-level descriptions leave the interpretation of implementation to the reader.  Each of the topics listed offers an opportunity to do something a little more progressive and effective than the norm, to embrace our transition to a knowledge society teeming with fluid, dynamic learning organizations in which tools and tactics from yesteryear will be rendered obsolete.

It’s our combined thoughts that bring us great things.

What a great quote, eh?

This came straight from my wife after a couple years of explaining to her what I do for a living.  After all the talk of wikis, social networking, collective intelligence, blogs, knowledge management, Web 2.0, etc. it was her that boiled it down to that statement.

Being so mired in the world of next-generation learning and development I am accustomed to, and comfortable with, the buzzwords of the trade but it’s sometimes difficult to translate the purpose and benefit of all of these funny sounding things to someone that has little insight into this world.

And her statement summed up quite a bit of it.  So much so that when she said it I sat up straight and wrote it down on a bar napkin [a relic of pre-Web 2.0 for any Gen Nexters that may be reading].

The more I thought about it this really encompasses the theory driving this revolution in how people learn, collaborate, innovate, communicate, etc. and the buzzwords are really just the ‘how.’  Communities of practice, social network analysis, rapid elearning, knowledge management and many others are just methods to accomplish the purpose of my wife’s synopsis – harnessing the power of people connected.

As with many other examples, it takes an outsider’s lens to shed a light of clarity on a topic that can become quite complex when left to the experts.

Then someone came along and proposed that perhaps nature and nurture each had a part in developing the whole person. This argument was of course called ‘nature/nurture.’

My reaction to this revelation? Duh.

Of course our genes shape who we are. Of course our experiences do too. The warring camps seemed too extreme and too black and white for me. It was clear that some interaction of how we are nurtured built upon how we are naturally resulted in what we become when we grow up.

I felt the same when reading the recent article in Fast Company, Is the Tipping Point Toast?

The author profiles Duncan Watts and his research that theorizes that the Influentials from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point are a misnomer. Watts suggests that trends ebb and flow more as a factor of the population’s readiness for them as opposed to the people that started them.

I think Watts makes interesting points and that they’re right some of the time. Am I to believe, though, that a popular blogger with a solid reputation for cogent insight is just as likely to stir up interest about something as someone that’s a known spammer? Tough to swallow…

In our work with clients we often start projects with a social network analysis. This dandy piece of software spits out network maps that provide us an x-ray into how information flows through an organization. We can clearly see the people within organizations that are sought out the most often. And they’re not random.

Individuals can become go-to/influential people due to their personality, insight, access or any number of other variables. It’s helpful to identify these individuals and utilize them in a new twist on change management [where influentials are selected to help with communication rather than the shotgun approach of most change initiatives] or knowledge transfer [where knowledge is downloaded from influentials prior to them being transfered or retiring and leaving a knowledge void in the network]. And it’s always been a foundational element in building a thriving learning community/community of practice [CoP].

So while there are elements of a given population having to be ready to accept a trend, there are also certainly factors emanating from different people that will affect the reach and rate of a trend that they [willingly or otherwise] attempt to start. Similar to the nature/nurture debate, there are elements from both sides that come into play when looking at the final outcome.

“What is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals?”

More compelling than the question, though, was some of the fodder and follow-up questions that Tony Karrer shared in the post.

• …a Chief Learning Officer panel discussion where it seemed that supporting informal learning or communities of practice was not something they were considering. 
• Do educational institutions and corporate learning and development departments have responsibility for supporting Long Tail Learning? 
• Do they have responsibility for learning beyond what can be delivered through instruction?

It shocked me to hear about the CLO panel discussion. With the overwhelming research out there confirming that today’s workforce is getting more and more of the information they need to do their job through informal means it’s difficult to understand why CLOs would resist supporting communities of practice or broader informal learning.

I feel that learning professionals should support learning. Period. Whatever form(s) of learning that are most beneficial to the workforce (as well as appropriate members of the value-chain) are the ones that should be pursued. There may be some organizations where communities of practice and/or informal learning don’t make sense as part of the learning portfolio but they should at least be considered.

As we move further away from our industrial society and further into our information society it’s my belief that a big part of learning initiatives will be providing easy access to information rather than supplying more information. The advent of Web 2.0 tools arrived at a great time for the renewed interest in communities of practice and I’m sure there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. It’s not about the technology though…it’s about the possibilities that now exist for what knowledge workers can do with the information they need. Now they can be part of creating and shaping the information they need rather than just recipients of content they are prescribed.

This combined with social network analyses and careful crafting of learning communities results in a sophisticated and dynamic learning strategy that happens to mesh well with the dynamic roles of many people in organizations today. It’s becoming increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to fit everything that someone needs to know into a course of any kind. Execution of strategy is or should be changing rather frequently as markets, customers, etc. fluctuate and the traditional forms of training won’t work as the sole solution for the workforce in these organizations. To ignore this is dangerous.

In an age where formal content is often ‘obsolete upon receipt’ it’s my belief that learning professionals will need to widen their scope in terms of what they will consider using as part of their learning portfolio. As with other investments in complex markets, it often pays to be diversified and to focus on areas where you’ll get the greatest return. Discounting new methods for supporting knowledge workers is akin to keeping all of your savings in CDs, bonds or treasury bills…you’re sure to get a little return but you’re not leveraging all of the opportunities out there; some of which may be better suited to your situation and therefore more likely to get you a better return.

To me this is further fodder on what have been relatively obscure tools coming more into the mainstream and being refined for use with progressive learning and development departments.

Orbital RPM has just launched a SNA with one of our large clients as a way to find the best candidates to make up the ‘core group’ of a community of practice.  This is being implemented in a very large, traditional organization that has always relied on traditional training for its team members. 

 We will be using the same amount of money the organization would have spent on designing, developing and delivering a one-time course…an event…but instead we will be engaged with them for a year.  Helping sustain their learning community, manage the knowledge that’s flowing and integrate new-comers.  What a bargain!

It’s projects like these and articles like the one in Fortune that will allow us to chip away at the conventional mindset commonly applied to the training arena.