In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and knocking down the walls that have separated businesses from their customers. Networks are ushering in new ways of doing business. Corporate approaches to learning have to change as well.
Some cutting-edge corporations are adopting a new bundle of practices – let’s call them informal learning 2.0 – in order to improve operating efficiency by:
- Slashing time to performance
- Increasing customer loyalty through learning
- Replacing bureaucracy through self-service
- Developing more informed marketing partners
- Improving learning along the supply chain
At the same time, the informal learning 2.0 approach sets the stage for broad cultural changes that strengthen the organization for the long term by enabling it to:
- Maintain flexibility in the face of incessant change
- Respond rapidly to competitive threats
- Put innovation on everyone’s to-do-list
- Enable workers to be all that they can be
- Establish frameworks for continuous improvements
In a networked corporation, there is scant difference between knowledge work and learning. Workers become problem solvers and innovators instead of cogs in the machine. The objective is ingenuity, not conformity. Business success depends on them working together rather than as individuals. Collaboration rules. They work and learn in what has been tagged by CLO Magazine as “learnscapes”.
Corporations can create superior “learnscapes” by injecting practices that foster optimal learning: interaction, ease of access, timely reinforcement, peer coaching, and cognitive apprenticeship and so on. Developing and nurturing “learnscapes” is not just something to keep training departments busy; it’s the top responsibility of this group and the ultimate key performance indicator.
Isn’t it time to get everyone in the corporation involved in learning?