Posts by date

• Personal Knowledge Management
• Social Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise
• Working Smarter through Social Learning
• Social Learning for Business

• Workscapes as frameworks for change (0) Harold Jarche There are few best practices for the network era workplace, but many next practices yet to be developed. A good place to start is with an integrative performance framework that puts formal training and education where they belong: focused on the appropria...
• Net Work Skills (0) Harold Jarche Imagine if we limited our conversations to only those in the same office.  We would miss out on so many learning opportunities. Well it seems some people are still missing out.  Today, people with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as prof...
• Making collaborative work, work (0) Harold Jarche Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling social something: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me it boils down to t...
• Changing how the important work gets done (0) Harold Jarche “What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” he said. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research. We’re not going to get ...
• Managing Workforce Collaboration (0) Harold Jarche Workforce Collaboration in the Network Era

  Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and networks subvert standardization.

  In the industrial era we saw the rise of specialized departments and specialized jobs. Any job could be generically designed and then fill...

• Getting to social: you simply can't train people to be social (0) Harold Jarche So you're now a social business?

  You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document managem...

• When learning is the work (0) Harold Jarche What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?

  I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, train...

• Enabling Innovation - Book (0) Harold Jarche I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book,Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is ...
• Internet Time Alliance Insights (0) Harold Jarche We can learn a lot from open conversations with trusted colleagues who want to improve their professional expertise. My colleagues have these conversations regularly and I have learned a lot over the past two years that we've been together.
  A professiona...
• Narration of Work (0) Harold Jarche I see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations:

  Transparency
  Narration of Work
  Distribution of Power

  I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of ...

• Democratization of the workplace (0) Harold Jarche There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said : “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organization...
• A World Without Bosses (0) Harold Jarche Can your organization work without bosses? In the documentary, Ban the Boss (one hour BBC video) Paul Thomas shows that most organizations can run just fine without bosses, or at least without traditional, hierarchical bosses who tell workers what to do.
  ...
• Informal learning, the 95% solution (0) Harold Jarche Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research behind this graphic, by Gary Wise.

  Since the latter half of the 20th century, we have gone through a p...

• Collective sense-making (0) Harold Jarche More of my online sense-making is in connecting to people, not accessing information sources. For instance, I read a few journals but I have dropped several, knowing that other people in my network will find the interesting articles and let me know. I use...
• Network thinking (0) Harold Jarche 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:

  Adaptability instead of control
  Emergence instead of predict...

• Bridging the gap: working smarter (0) Harold Jarche 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 ...

• Integrating learning into the business (0) Harold Jarche 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 answ...

• Why do we need social business? (0) Harold Jarche The Dachis Group’s latest XPLANATiON of the attributes of a socially optimized business is a pretty good answer to the question, “What is social business?”

  Looking just at the key differences in the info-graphic, I’d like to dig into “Why” these di...

• Social learning: the freedom to act and cooperate with others (0) Harold Jarche “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy“ - Article #7 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999.

  The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in ...

• The community dance hall (0) Harold Jarche In Diversity, Complexity & Chaos I highlighted several articles by others that discussed these themes and I finished with this graphic:

  Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) noted that her challenge is to “foster movement between the bubbles” and I res...

• Personal Knowledge Management (0) Harold Jarche Network learning, or personal knowledge management (PKM), is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past, self-directed learning may have involved keeping a journal, writing letters or havi...
• Social Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise (0) Harold Jarche
  The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards. ~...
• Working smarter through social learning (0) Harold Jarche This past week I had the opportunity to discuss social learning in the workplace with many people. Explaining a concept helps to understand it. It’s part of my active sense-making as a networked learner. I’ve mentioned before how Ross Dawson’s five waysto...
• Social learning for business (0) Harold Jarche Here’s an elevator pitch, in 10 sentences, for social learning, which is what really makes social business work.

  The increasing complexity of our work is a result of our global interconnectedness.
  Today, simple work is being automated (e.g. bank tel...

• Network Learning: Working Smarter (0) Harold Jarche “In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…” ~ Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize ...
• Agility and Autonomy (0) Harold Jarche for social learning to be successfully implemented in an organisation it is not just about adding in the new tools or platforms but also about acquiring a new mindset and new skillset for both learning professionals and individuals.
  Jane Hart  shows in t...
• The Future of the Training Department (0) Harold Jarche The latter 20th Century was the golden era of the training department. Before the 20th Century, training per se did not exist outside the special needs of the church and the military. Now the training department may be at the end of its life cycle. Join u...
• Mapping metrics (0) Harold Jarche Beth Kanter shares her presentation on Mapping metrics to strategy (with slide show) focused on non-profits using social media:
  The session will share an overview of why the sequence listen, learn, andadapt is critical to implementing a successful social...
• Informal learning and performance technology (0) Harold Jarche Is informal learning just another flavour of the month that tries to be all things for all learners? Tony Karrer states that:
  I’m becoming convinced that folks in the informal learning realm are quite willing to live with “free range” learning. It’s way ...
• Training: A Solution Looking for a Problem (0) Harold Jarche While listening to the radio the other day, the person being interviewed spoke about the need for training for those responsible for ensuring clean water in many remote Canadian communities. Now, I’m not going to say that training is not required, but mak...

More top posts

• A new view on lurkers
• It is time to simplify
• Learning in the workplace
• When we remove artificial boundaries
• Thanks for the code
• Etiquette for sharing
• Do you want fries with that?
• The performance appraisal treadmill
• The Web changes business
• The college in transition

Harold Jarche is a thought-catalyst who passionately believes in the integration of work and learning. People have connected with Harold over the past decade, through his blog and consulting practices, for innovative ideas on leadership, networked business, social learning and personal knowledge management.

Organizations often come to him – established companies, start-ups and non-profits – because they need a trusted advisor who can help create a road map and then guide them on implementation. He also distills heady topics like complexity theory into practical advice.

A graduate of the Royal Military College and the University of New Brunswick, Harold served over 20 years in the Canadian Army in leadership and training roles. Harold held senior positions at the Centre for Learning Technologies and was Chief Learning Officer at e-Com Inc. He is currently an Instructor at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute.

A guiding goal in much of his work is the democratization of the enterprise. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and he believes it should be the basis of our workplaces as well.

As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, Harold sees great opportunities to create better employment models. He knows that we can do better than cubicle farms, cookie-cutter job descriptions, generic work competencies and boring, dead-end jobs.

Harold has been engaged to speak on learning and industry issues at many venues, including IEEE, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication; the American Society for Training & Development; and The Conference Board of Canada.

Harold has become a thought leader and blogger extraordinaire in the area of personal learning environments and social media for learning and collaboration. Through his blog and consulting practice, people look to Harold for innovative ideas for using technology for learning and performance improvement. They’re never disappointed. ~ Tom Gram

Harold gave no judgements, no criticism whatsoever, just the clear picture of ourselves as an organisation and constructive advice for helping us decide what we wanted to become. ~ Jacques Cool

Harold was not selling miracles but a way to deeply analyse the client context and processes in order to find out the best working and more affordable solution. So I strongly recommend Harold for his analytical skills, competences and integrity. ~ Albert Lejeune, PhD

I follow Harold’s thinking because his tweets and his blog are beacons of light in the dark landscape of organizational learning. ~ Ken Homer

Harold Jarche’s blog gets right to the crux of the issues. He is good to learn from. ~ Adam Weisblat

Harold Jarche is smartsmartsmartsmartsmartsmart. He sees the big patterns as clearly – or maybe more clearly – than he sees the details. More often than not, his thinking feels like someone threw me a life preserver when I’m battling through too high waves, just trying to keep my head above water. I feel so grateful for this clarity. It assists me with my own sense-making. And makes it easier to move into conversation. ~ Meri Walker