In our organization (a group of several hundred who work in the
creation, support, and admnistration of various aspects of
information technology and information systems), we have begun
to focus on collective learning. But we have taken a limited-
technology approach, at least for the short term. Let me
explain . . .
We have the general perception that several things must come
together for shared-learning concept to take hold. First, if you
intend to _share_ knowledge, you must somehow identify the people
who _have_ the knowledge (or they must self-identify). That may
require (in our case it does anyway) a shift within the
organization that fosters and encourages the development of
greater depth in some people -- they become less generalist
and more specialist.
Second, you must somehow provide an environment which permits
those people the opportunity to make that knowledge coherent
and also make it explicit. That is, they must have legitimate
time for reflection and dialog with peers inside and outside
the organization.
Third, the organization must provide rewards or recognition of
some sort for those people for actually sharing that knowledge.
That is, the organization must break down the prevailing mindset of
'individual indispensability' -- I am valuable because of
what I alone know!
Fourth, the organization must tolerate failure and risk-taking
since so much of our learning seems to emerge from things which
do not work the first time. That is, I will not let you know
what I learned if revealing that I learned it 'the hard way' will
become a 'career limiting move.'
Fifth, providing a highly sophisticated scheme to house this
knowledge may be premature and may in fact inhibit the dissemination
if the people are still at the 'folklore' level of sharing
(e.g. sharing by story-telling and scenarios, as opposed to
compiling the distillation of 'best practices' into a series
of expert system type rules).
ps I monitor this and several other lists. I act as compiler /
editor, picking out the notes and threads which I think that my
colleagues will find interesting / provocative. More work for
me, but they have less to wade through (although they clearly
get my strong influence on what they see!). So they may get
fewer than a half dozen notes instead of the several dozen
which I get. And they get notes from different perspectives,
including learning organizations, business process reengineering,
training and development, systems design, etc. And within
the last few days I put my 'selections' into Lotus Notes for
most of my colleagues, although still get them by e-mail.
Michael Ayers
mbayers@mmm.com (612) 733-5690 FAX (612) 737-7718
3M Center Bldg 224-2NE-02 PO Box 33224 St Paul MN 55133-3224