You can position yourself for serendipity

Last Friday I attended my wife's staff holiday party for the Everson Museum of Art. At one point there was a brief lull in the conversation and a staff member I hardly knew asked me casually for some advice on buying a Christmas present for a family member.

She is perplexed and the pressure is mounting since Christmas is one week away. She asked me for an idea...she asked if I knew of an "it" gift. She went on to explain that it is her family's tradition that everyone buy a single gift that any member of the family would enjoy and/or appreciate. Then, in White Elephant style, they open and trade until all are left with something nice.

Of course my nature as a learning professional was to avoid generating a solution until I understood the details of the problem (in my profession this is a blessing...at a Christmas party ...its a curse). I immediately began a litany of questions...a needs analysis to determine who the family members were, how many, ages, gender, past history of gift types, etc...

In that moment though I had a flash. I recently joined Jane Bozarth's sponsored book club on HootCourse; #lrnbkpull, where we are reading The Power of Pull by John Seely Brown. We have been talking much about serendipity and serendipitous learning as of late.

In the book, Brown speaks of serendipity as "the chance encounter with someone or something that we did not even now existed, much less had value, but that proves to be extraordinarily relevant and helpful once we find out about it."

I though about this and I thought about my own approach to gift buying. You see I'm not all that calculated. I can't just sit down and ponder the person, their wants, needs, likes, etc and rationalize a great gift. No, my approach has always been haphazard. Instead of surrounding myself with thoughts of the person ...I surround myself with potential gifts; I go to a particular type of store, like Marshalls or TJ Maxx. If you haven't been to one of these department stores, you've been somewhere like it. It's basically the Island of Misfit Toys. A collection of overstock from larger band name stores, clothing with minor flaws, knick-knacks, toys, shoes, and home appliances and decor all packed into a rectangular warehouse like building.

It may not be organized, upscale or pretty, but it is rich with ideas. I choose to wander among the different isles completely immersed in the material. It probably sounds inefficient or frustrating to some, but what it does for me is inspire. My mind races as I scan various items - each having something to offer. I watch and overhear people talking about purchases and who they are for and why. I ask questions of the staff, and with each answer more ideas and potential are revealed... until Boom! it hits me...and the idea is there.

In The Power of Pull, the authors write that meeting new people and finding new ideas can be fun but attraction and the serendipity that arises from it takes on increasing value as we look to the edges of our interest areas and increase the probability of serendipitous encounters at the most relevant times.

So I told the stressed staff member of my approach and that she should head to Marshalls tomorrow and wander. Even if she didn't purchase there, she may find inspiration. She was surprised and yet seemed relieved to have a new direction. For her this was the relevant time, it was the 11th hour for holiday shopping...Marshalls to someone of her status was definitely the edge; an area she hadn't really explored. But she made herself open that night and experienced the serendipitous. She had a chance encounter with me, a performance specialist, a person/profession definitely on the edges of her interest areas. This encounter led to an idea/approach that never crossed her mind previously.

#lrnbkpull member, Bill Cush (@billcush) tweeted it best recently: "Serendipity requires being "out there" constantly, in search of new ideas w/ no immediate results..then boom!"

So, are you constantly out there? moving away from your center, your safer area, to meet the people, ideas on the edges? If not, do you really expect innovation and inspiration? For as Brown states, "You can position yourself for serendipity."

Leverage the Greenest to Create a Collaborative Organizational Culture

One of the biggest barriers to bringing collaborative technology into the workplace is organizational culture. Not all resistant organizational cultures are due to extreme command & control issues, resistance to anything perceived to be "time wasting" or a security risk. In fact I’d bet most barriers are not rock solid and are actually more like Andy Dufresne’s cell wall in Shawshank Redemption... thick but porous.

The thickness is simply layer upon layer of misconception and long held beliefs about learning in organizations having to be formal and tied tightly to an L&D department. However the wall is also porous, caused by the need for agility in a poor economy, and a desire for innovation. In this environment change is not impossible but it tends to be evolutionary; like Andy, one can chip away for years and years with a small rock hammer and then have to wait for a big thunderstorm (i.e. a huge painful business problem) before they can punch through.

Typically culture change is desired BEFORE one can implement collaborative technologies.

Could one use collaborative technology and approaches to change the culture or change it faster?
That's the question I, with my teammate's assistance, have set out to answer as we have employed an approach that just may work and is far less evolutionary.

The focus of our effort to bring collaborative technologies to the organization's mainstream is not through using SoMe tools to solve a specific business problem, nor is it to work with middle management to drive acceptance both up and down the hierarchy. No, actually it’s by leveraging the greenest, least entrenched, least empowered group in the whole organization, the Newly Hired!

Let me start by telling you that SharePoint is our Intranet, and the source of all our organization wide collaborative tools. Although these tools can sometimes be less robust than desired, I am pragmatic and work first with what we have, bringing oil to the wheel only if it squeaks.

The L&D department is one of the first to make contact with new hires. For their first 2 weeks of employment they are in field offices getting exposure to the business. It is here I began to introduce training class specific blogs to them before they come to our headquarters for the first of several weeks of F2F training distributed over a 10 week program.

While in the field, we ask them to use the blog to introduce themselves to their peers in other training offices and share their daily experiences.

Once they attend a week long training in a F2F environment at HQ they return to the field for more practical applications of their training. Naturally they now have placed a face with a name and begin to have less formal conversations via the blog, albeit they are mostly related to their work experiences.

The group begins to form an identity. Less inhibited, they are comfortable posting questions, sharing a tip, sharing a joke, and telling stories of successes and failures. I’ve asked our trainers to try to refrain from answering their questions immediately and encourage their community to do so. Also the trainers are to seed the conversations with requests for members to not only share what their successes were, but what they did specifically to be successful (process not just product).

The trainees are geographically dispersed for the majority of their new hire experience, so the blog serves to keep them connected and helps maintain a support system of true peers. As their time in the training program advances, the L&D staff begin to leverage the blog to extend formal classroom learning initiatives. These efforts focus on asking the new hires to draw upon practical experiences to complete collaborative Q&A sessions, share situational best practices, and reflect on the content used in context.

This social connection is alleviating pressure found in most formal environments; the 10lbs of content in the 5lbs bag syndrome. We are now able to spread formal training out and allow for deeper reflection on the content.

Secondary to the training extension and growth of social media use for learning is that the blog is becoming an invaluable formative evaluation tool of our training sessions. The trainers can ascertain from the posts which performance objectives are being met and which the class is struggling with. This real time data allows us to quickly update and improving the curriculum.

After the new hires complete the training and are placed into their role, the community is kept alive by the participants. These CoP’s are helping the isolated staff to stay connected and continue growing with peer support.

Today we are working to roll the 15 + training groups consisting of over 100 people together into a single company-wide blog that is exclusive to their role. Homogeneous groups can only grow their knowledge and skill so much.

By reaching out to veteran employees, who have not yet been exposed to internal social media, we plan to have a select few guests post throughout the year to share insights and ideas in an effort to grow the community and its value.

As more and more new hires are introduced to the tools their comfort level and expectation to use them grows. In addition, the newest in the company become a strong voice in promoting the value. As class by class rolls into the organizational mainstream armed with SoMe rock hammers they continue to chisel away in unison until the wall simply crumbles.