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I had an opportunity today to have the dedicated ears of 18 mid-level managers at a large organization where we are just at the launch phase of creating a community of practice.  This is a group of sales people in a competitive environment and the suggetion of sharing ideas with one another has to be approached very carefully.  Last night I began assembling slides and this morning I went back to put on some finishing touches - I checked my email and saw this article from CLO magazine. 

I included a screen shot of the article as a way to illustrate to the group that learning in organizations is moving away from just formal content delivery and more toward enabling easier access to necessary information.  These ideas really resonated with them and some of the responses were, “like MySpace” or like an “eBay seller rating” for peer reviewed content and also “like Amazon.” 

I wrote recently about how there was a seeming disconnect between some Chief Learning Officers (CLO) and these progressive modes of learning but it’s encouraging to see the gap gradually narrow with entries such as this.

As organizations begin to find the collective intelligence of their workforce through social network analysis and tap their full potential through communities of practice and the software to support them, they will be poised to unleash the true potential of knowledge workers.

I just read a great article in Fortune magazine about Social Network Analysis (SNA) and the benefits it can yield in an organization.

To me this is further fodder on what have been relatively obscure tools coming more into the mainstream and being refined for use with progressive learning and development departments.

Orbital RPM has just launched a SNA with one of our large clients as a way to find the best candidates to make up the ‘core group’ of a community of practice.  This is being implemented in a very large, traditional organization that has always relied on traditional training for its team members. 

 We will be using the same amount of money the organization would have spent on designing, developing and delivering a one-time course…an event…but instead we will be engaged with them for a year.  Helping sustain their learning community, manage the knowledge that’s flowing and integrate new-comers.  What a bargain!

It’s projects like these and articles like the one in Fortune that will allow us to chip away at the conventional mindset commonly applied to the training arena.