I’m regularly trying to do two things: explore mobile capabilities, and get folks to think more broadly about how we can support performance in the organization.  I was asked to flesh out a proposed title for a stage at the upcoming mLearnCon, and thought about trying to map the 4C’s of mobile to the major categories of mobile work opportunities.  It’s a slightly different take than my previous meta-mobile post where I looked at performance support, formal learning, and meta-learning. Read more →

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 appropriate 5%.

Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:

Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in “pull” mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient. Read more →

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 three principles: narration, transparency & shared power. Read more →

“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 out of research. We believe we do certain things well in research but we want to work with more outside companies, startup biotechs, with universities.”

Chris Viehbacher, CEO of pharmaceutical company Sanofi recently stated that ” …  big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation.” It seems Sanofi is moving to a more networked way of doing business. But to be more innovative, companies must first become open and transparent. Read more →

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 filled by the most suitable applicant. People became interchangeable pieces for the mechanistic model of work. As jobs are to departments, roles are to networks. Eric Mcluhan states that in the new [network] era; “jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation.” Read more →

OK, these skills are not actually “new” –  they’ve always been present – but perhaps they have not always been as visible as they should have been, as Oscar Berg explains in The collaboration pyramid (or iceberg). But, as businesses transform into social businesses, the social workplace is going to become more and more reliant on these skills. Read more →

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 used to read many of the technology blogs, like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web but have dropped them from my feed reader and instead read posts that have been referred via Twitter, Google Plus or blog posts. Read more →

Article written for e-Learning Age magazine, November 2011

With the emergence of new social media tools, the word “Social” is being prefixed to old words to form new terms like “Social Business” and “Social Media Marketing”, and of course we now see the increasing use of the term “Social Learning”. Read more →

In Part One  of this series of blog postings, I asked the question:

“As business is becoming more social and we are using new social tools to work collaboratively with one another, do we really need another set of social tools specifically for learning?” Read more →