Ten days ago I flew to Switzerland for a mountaintop retreat with twenty thought leaders from around the world to ponder better ways to manage organizations.

On the flight over, I watched the film Inside Job, a documentary about the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown fueled by the subprime mortgage bubble. The movie’s incendiary. There are lots of bad apples out there: self-serving financial engineers, ratings agencies, regulators, bankers, and more. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
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“This is business.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather

Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring, and Worker Spring may break out any day. Everyone’s mad as hell. They won’t take it any more.
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I’ve been using the tag ‘learning experience design strategy’ as a way to think about not taking the same old approaches of events über ales. The fact of the matter is that we’ve quite a lot of models and resources to draw upon, and we need to rethink what we’re doing.
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Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:

1. Adaptability instead of control

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In 1885, Herman Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, carried out an experiment that led to the formulation of the famous Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Many people know of the experiment and that the Forgetting Curve suggests adults will remember less that 50% of what they’ve learned within an hour of learning unless they have the opportunity to reinforce and practice it during or immediately afterwards…
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Businesses talk about adapting to change quickly, but they don’t take advantage of it. When a practice is not producing results, it’s time to unlearn it. Organizations that don’t embrace new ways of operating and radically different approaches to corporate learning will not survive for three reasons:
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Nigel Paine recently produced a very good ten-minute video on The Learning Explosion. Nigel used one of my diagrams in his presentation and this motivated me to explain it in a bit more detail.

The slide presentation is designed to be self-explanatory and may help convince management of the need to integrate working and learning. As Nigel says, and I agree, being an effective team player is just one aspect of the 21st century workplace. We must also share our expertise across the organization while encouraging people to develop external networks. That’s what this model tries to explain. Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks.
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This is the second part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.
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