Losing the Soul of Social

Technology can extend the human condition but it can also work to dehumanize, transforming the sincere ideals of community and relationships into exploitable resources. The vendor marketing machines have lots of money and content marketing is their new effort to turn spin doctors into gurus as they work to convince you they are not selling but educating. Let the buyer beware. Some "though leaders" in this space are really after mind control and in many ways I think it's working. For example I sat in a conference session recently which was a bit alarming. The discussion was centered on community building but was framed around tools. No discussion of trust and time and shared values or support. Rather it was a conversation about things like how to use gamification to get people to share! Or this recent post titled How to Master Social Marketing Quickly and Effectively which is chock full of advice like Automate It, Know Your Numbers, Get Followers. More likely than not some of the approaches in this article work in the short-term but are quite devoid of anything resembling sincerity or human relationship building.

Technology is seductive. I underestimated its power at my previous organization. I had leadership on board that improving transparency and collaboration would help in reducing redundancy and increase innovation; a huge win. Within days a team formed to assess social technology options! I was dismayed but also being new I figured it was best to tentatively support this as I naively believed that I could simultaneously explore technology solutions and also assess how we were currently collaborating and communicating throughout the organization. I carried on looking for where the pockets of healthy teams, departments and interactions were. I sought out conversations that informed me of barriers as well identified ambassadors or nodes in our already existing networks. I deepened my understanding of the business and culture. While I looked at business problems the tech train was gaining strength. My slow roll out was ultimately compromised by a need to justify the expense of a chosen solution. How ridiculous of me to a think we would leave a Porsche parked in the garage when it looked so sunny outside. The platform was on the table too soon and too many were letting tech take the wheel.  In the end the technology rolled out before the needs of the organization were really defined. Not quite a failure but definitely a struggle that was unnecessary as adoption became the goal not adaptation where real business value was.

"Money is in technology focus, but effect is in people focus." - James Tyer

Human history is littered with examples of where technology temporarily blinded us with devastating results to body and mind. The Industrial Revolution made people mere appendages of the machines and child labor was a widely accepted practice.  More recently (and far less cruel) Learning Management System spin has misled people into believing a formal course is how and where learning takes place and that access, completions and scores equate to learning - wasting time, money and reducing morale. The former was ultimately defeated through the birth of labor unions and progressive legislation and today, the LMS is under attack by progressive minds using data to help people see where learning is actually happening and change mindsets.  Eventually, as history shows, we do come to our senses. However, if we sit passively allowing the voices of deception to coexist with the sincere, the longer it will take us to realize the true benefits of social - benefits gained as we move through the machine not within it

Conversation Brings Change, Naturally

I've been thinking about Media Naturalness theory for some time. Well, more often it just pops up because it's not like I've invested all than much effort into it. In short, if you're not familiar, Media Naturalness Theory is the idea that human beings were built for face-to-face communication over thousands of years of evolution. Our gestures, voice inflection, eye movement, body language all contribute to giving and receiving information. Therefore anything that shifts away from this "medium" impacts our ability to effectively communicate. There was a lot of study around this with the introduction of email. To learn more I found this Wikipedia article a pretty good place to start.

Being more into the media rich New Social Learning (i.e. learning through social technology), I haven't put much stock into Media Naturalness theory but I had a bit of an epiphany at a recent meet-up here in Syracuse. I'm a member of a local Bloggers Facebook group. We comment and exchange posts as well as ask for advice, etc. I was wanting to meet some of these fine people in person and pick their brains about blogging and why they do it, how they do it, tools, approaches, etc. I think I'm somewhat of an outlier in this space as I don't blog for money, I do it for myself (although if the occasional speaking gig arises I usually don't say no), my topic is a bit fringe, and I'm a bit of a purist in that I focus exclusively on my writing/reflecting and do nothing in regard to researching tags, SEO and monetization.

Meeting virtual friends face to face is always pleasant and since we didn't engage much in long discussions in our Facebook group the opportunity was there to sit, have a beer and just hear each others voices if nothing else. Upon my arrival I moseyed up to a trio and introduced myself. After exchanging pleasantries I was asked by one, Joe I believe, "So what is it you write about exactly?" Without missing a beat I rattled off something like "I write about organizational social. How increasing transparency and openness can improve performance. You know, how social tools can be used inside an organization for sharing and collaboration."  As I sputtered out my final words I realized, but didn't feel compelled to add it in, that I said nothing about learning. I hadn't even whispered the term that has defined my career for over 20 years now. No ID. No elearning. No L&D. No training. Nothing.

Blogging has a unique pressure that really only strikes you when you hit "publish." Even as comments to your posts come in, you can pause almost indefinitely and ponder a reply. But in the heat of a face-to-face conversation, with real human eyes cast upon you and ears finely tuned, your response is unrehearsed, visceral and probably the most honest you can give. I write so much on my interest, beliefs, observations, efforts, etc that I really haven't even given conscious thought to the transformation I have been undertaking. In reflecting on this moment over the past week I started looking back at my conversations online, my blog posts over the past few months and years and the pattern was obvious; I have slowly shifted away from being L&D-centric and have been seeing the whole organization's role in impacting individual performance. Learning is a part of the work not apart from it. And thus learning is mostly indistinguishable from the other activities that make up the work we do, it is an unconscious underpinning. No longer does learning, in the formal sense, dominate my thinking and practice any more than communication, human interaction, culture, leadership, and trust.

Change happens one conversation at a time or in this case, change is made obvious through conversation. And why not - we've been learning about others and ourselves this way for thousands of years.

Big Social Isn't Always Best

I've been thinking more about how Social has become SO big, so fast. Maybe it's having been in Texas recently (where everything is bigger!) for mLearnCon last week or it's because I've been reading a lot of Stowe Boyd's reviews and research tied into his ideas on "sets vs. scenes." Social is not necessarily getting bigger in the sense of popularity but in the sense that enterprise social, to be deemed successful today, has to involve the entire organization - the scene as Stowe would call it.

My observations and conversations have led me to believe that technology is ruling the day and leading the narrative. And having a vibrant ESN is the golden calf (or is that hippo?). Successful social is not however in the depth and number of connections but in the meaningfulness of the social activity. Often, unfortunately, the larger the networks, the more superficial the relationships can be. Whereas In organizations, our closest, most impactful relationships are those that are around the work we do. A simple principle to grasp is that Social forms around objects, and the object in organizations is the work. The farther one is removed from the work we do, the farther they are from our interests and that is quite natural.

By PJ KAPDostie CC BY-SA 3.0 

In my work promoting "social" in my various organizations, I found another principle to be true; the smaller the better. Specific groups, already with a clear "object", be it shared work (department, project, program) shared experience (on-boarding, training), or shared problem (solutioning, crisis) were most successful. Larger roll-outs, not so much. Social technology success was achieved when it was used as a tool to solve small specific problems. From here it could scale, but please don't call it a community. People sharing, collaborating, and conversing should not instantly be seen as a community. A feature in a tool called a "community" is not a community, it is marketing spin by ESN vendors. True communities form when their is trust, common purpose and mutual support. This takes time, not tools. Can these gatherings in virtual places become communities? Absolutely. They can also scale but that takes nurturing and attention, support and communication. If your organization is not ready for this, it's OK. Organizations as community is not always the end goal or often immediately realistic. If groups come in and out of interactions using social tools to solve business problems then this should be seen as successful social too.

Maybe the message is as simple as the one I tell my kids; don't let others define what success is. Celebrate the small wins, they add up.

The Open Office: Right Idea, Wrong Approach

In a not so recent article (Dec 2014) criticizing the open office idea as getting it wrong and ruining the workplace, the author ranted about how negatively disruptive this disruptive approach has been in her own circumstance. To that I say exactly- it's not for everyone. Organizations are as unique as fingerprints and if companies don't first understand the nature of the work being performed and just blindly follow a trend, well damned they should be.

Lafayette Studios photographs: 1930s decade

The real problem for me with this trend though is that when people think of an open office, they think of the traditional 20th century workplace but with low or no walls separating people. That's it. Remove physical barriers and viola! Innovation! Really?

This is just simply getting a good idea all wrong.

Daniel Pink, among others, makes the claim in his book Free Agent Nation, that 50% of U.S. workers will be free agents by 2020. And an Intuit 2020 report predicted a while back that traditional employment will no longer be the norm. It will be replaced by contingent workers; free-agents, part-timers, contractual.  If accurate, then 2020 is only 5 years away and although those numbers seem aggressive it appears things are moving this direction. With more short-term contractual workers, employers definitely need an open office... but not the physical kind, that's just silly. Open is practice not a space. For a person it's an internal choice, for an organization, a group of people, being open is a cultural underpinning. Openness is sharing, open to collaborate, open to criticism and to criticize, open to contribution... from wherever you are seated. Openness, supported by collaborative technology, turns the physical office into a concept. The "office" becomes an artificial structure, no walls inside or out. 

Removing cubicle walls may allow others to see the machinery but real openness, between connected people anywhere, invites them to move the levers. The open office idea today is missing the point. It's similar to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, business as usual in an increasingly unusual world. 

We Don't Do Social Here

Implement, Do, Start, Launch, are all terms that indicate a program or project is underway. It's the language of the business initiative. But when these words precede the action of "Social", it's a bit perplexing.  

We don't "do" social, we are social. 

Being social is just connecting, communicating, and sharing usually with the key action of conversing. Don't let anyone tell you different. We should know too that being social is not purely positive. People can connect for the wrong reasons, communicate inappropriately, or share way, way too much. Therefore being social is neither something exclusively good or bad, it is just the essence of being human. To say things like "we are going to start doing social in our organization" is like saying "we are going to start doing breathing." This comparison is equally similar and different. Similar in that both actions, social and breathing are naturally occurring and required (in an organization or otherwise), and different in that breathing is not something that can ever be consciously done poorly or insincerely.

You can encourage people to increase their social connections, expand their networks, start more meaningful conversations and share ideas. But make no mistake, your organization is already social, it just may not be healthy enough to transform the work that's being done or make the environment less toxic, or draw people to connect with your service or products.

So if you're still thinking about "doing" social in your organization, maybe start by "being" a better organization, leader, employee, peer. Somethings you just can't project manage. 

Network Navigating

I've written recently about the futility of organizational internal social efforts. Their efforts to corral conversations into an ESN is ineffective and short sighted. Wirearchy is here. It exists with or without ones conscious effort as our networks extend in multiple directions and multiple "places."  We will go to where our people are and if our people overlap, all the better, but the reality is they rarely will. For example my running community members have zero interest in my social learning and social business discussions. 

So it is that we must learn to move in and out of various channels of conversations and relationships, adjusting as we need to to make it all work. However in the networked age this seems as overwhelming as the amount of information that comes at us.

Do choices have to be made? Of course. It's really no different than our behaviors prior to the advent of social technology. We made room and found balance then in things like our physical meeting spaces, telephone conversations, email, etc. We made choices then of how and where we would spend time. We (often unconsciously) seek out the people who matter most and in that seeking we inadvertently learn to navigate the places that keep us connected.

My networking "places" are as fragmented and unique as my relationships. Here are a few of my places I visit daily which I'm sure look much like yours.

• Twitter for amazing global relationships and conversations
• 2 Facebook groups for specific professional development and a book club
• LinkedIn for local ATD conversations and sharing
• iMessage groups (smaller, family & friends)
• Skype group for larger L&D discussions, tips, needs
• Evernote chat for project collaboration
• Yammer for organization cooperative and collaborative activities
• Slack for idea sharing in L&D topics for various activities

This is our reality. I doubt highly that as social tools evolve there will be one tool to rule them all or a way to link them. This reality may be inconvenient to many but social networking has always been inconvenient to some extent. Waving the white flag is not an option. We will learn these new network navigation skills through experimentation, increased exposure and they will strengthen with deeper experiences in the context of connecting. With modeling and guidance by those in the know, the learning curve can be reduced more quickly but even without the experts, we will learn to navigate, it's what we are built to do.

From The Business of Learning to The Learning Business

As you may have heard, about 3 weeks ago I joined the eLearning Guild and will be working closely with the learning community and onsite events. It's a small step in my employment journey but a large leap in my career. So, how's it going so far? Really good. I am getting immersed in the processes and people that make up this organization and contributing immediately where I can. I'm also being very patient with myself so I can better ensure that I have a good understanding of all the connected parts.

When I was first approached by the Guild I was of course intrigued and flattered. The eLearning Guild is a leader in this space, the "learning" space. I've been a member for years and spoken at several of their events. Of course when I speak, I speak about how I've used social technology in the organizations I've worked for. Therefore joining the Guild could be seen as a bit of a departure for me as it is the "eLearning" Guild after all. A colleague even remarked, "You're like the social guy, I wonder how this will be received?" But I and others saw it differently; not as a departure but more like a merger.

eLearning today does not mean what it once did and the Guild gets this. In the early 2000's the eLearning Guild answered a growing call for more information, ideas, technology and approaches in the then budding eLearning space. eLearning is continually transforming and today, driven by the interest and practices of the community, it can no longer be seen as just courses and classes delivered online. Due to expanding consumer technologies, mobile devices and the advent of Web2.0, elearning has become ubiquitous. The community conversations around eLearning have shifting rightfully to be more about Learning than just the vehicles that deliver or augment it. 

Web 2.0 in particular ushered in a populous movement across the Internet and has given rise to a New Social Learning. Growing learner autonomy and global interdependence has hastened the decline of a dependence on traditional learning approaches. The new Social Learning however will not be the nail in the coffin for traditional elearning or training, nor should it be, as formal learning is still very much needed. What the reinvigorated (or new) Social Learning has done is bring balance to the beliefs and practices around learning and put formal in its rightful, more limited place. Social learning is forcing a community conversation about how formal learning must improve its quality and impact to remain relevant.  

The Guild was designed as a platform to encourage this and other conversations where members can openly share their thoughts and ideas and then the Guild can communicate this back through research, resources, and events for the community. Community and conversation are at the core of the eLearning Guild and because of this they (ah hem...) we are positioned to help hasten the changes needed and help organizational learning to keep up with the speed of business.  

I'm excited to be more a part of this conversation and to be able to bring my own practices and beliefs about learning to the Guild. I look forward to taking part in the larger community, working with you all, and helping to better see and be the future of organizational learning.