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E-Networks: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em
September 18, 2008
Web 2.0 technologies are changing the paradigm for learning from filling individual learners' heads with knowledge to tuning networks of experienced individuals to a given problem or opportunity. Now's the time to join the Webvolution.
By Tony O'Driscoll
There is an adage that suggests the diffusion of innovation follows a predictable path: A scientific discovery informs the creation of a new technology, which ushers in a new set of business opportunities that end up reshaping the structure of industries and organizations. An apple falling on Newton's head leads to the creation of the laws of physics, leadingto the invention of the internal combustion engine, followed by the emergence of the automobile industry, culminating in Alfred Sloan's creation of the modern-day bureaucracy and Henry Ford's assembly line. Another adage suggests society, industry, and enterprises co-evolve over time. If you track the architecture of organizations over the last four decades, moving from centralized bureaucratic hierarchies with rigid boundaries to flatter topological structures with more permeable boundaries, you will notice there is a syncopation with the IT architectures that underpin the enterprise: from the monolithic centralized mainframes to the client-server model to the decentralized Web that undergirds today's enterprise infrastructures.
Yet another adage suggests technology works through indirection. It feeds on itself, thus enabling it to expand and diffuse through society and industry at exponential rates. Moore's law—often articulated as the observation that computers double in speed every 18 months—is but one example of technology's exponential growth. In fact, the phenomenon of computer speed doubling has been maintained from the time of vacuum tubes and no doubt will continue once we move from silicon-based transistors to molecular computing. Technology builds on past success and learns from it to get faster at what it does over and over and over again.
A fourth adage suggests individuals and organizations are predictable in how they go about applying new technologies. This phenomenon often is referred to as routinization: We use them to automate and accelerate our existing tasks and processes without considering how the technology itself might change what we actually could do. The printing press was used for decades to print the Gutenberg Bible before someone had the bright idea to use it to print other books, too. The steam engine first was used to power cotton gins before someone had the bright idea to invent the locomotive.
The final adage—at least for the purposes of this article—suggests any organization that cannot adapt at least as fast as the business environment within which it operates is destined to regress to the mean of mediocrity. Think of the business environment as a pressure chamber and imagine your organization as a balloon within that chamber. If the molecules within the balloon are not moving as fast as the molecules in the chamber, the balloon will shrink.
Put these five adages together and it becomes clear that the relentless pace and acceleration of technology is ratcheting up the pressure in the business environment, requiring that enterprises take on the qualities of adaptive organisms rather than rigid hierarchies. In short, technology is having an increasing and accelerating transformational impact across all industries and on the organizations
All of this adds up to an era of unprecedented change for both the enterprise and the people who work within it. For change to occur, there is a precondition that learning take place. An old dog remains an old dog unless it learns a new trick. This would suggest that the learning function, the organization responsible for overseeing and driving change within the enterprise, should become increasingly strategic to the enterprise. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Training budgets are shrinking year over year. So what gives?
The irony is that the training function itself is acting like an old dog. We have not learned from our prior mistakes in applying technology to help the enterprises we serve become more adaptive and innovative. In many ways, the training function has fallen into the routinization trap by applying radically new technologies to automate or speed up that which we always have done.
Just like Henry Ford's assembly line, we have our own organizational and procedural artifacts such as the ADDIE model, and, in predictable fashion, we largely have applied technology to speed it up. Technology knows nothing about quality but is addicted to speed. It is like a jet propellant, speeding up whatever it
is applied to. If the processes and procedures you imbue with technology are aligned and streamlined, this can be a good thing. If they are not, then applying technology merely exposes their shortcomings more rapidly. In the case of learning, we have been, consciously or not, beholden to the ADDIE model and the classroom paradigm since the end of World War II. We have hit a point where application of technology to these paradigms merely increases the efficiency with which we train poorly.
The current teacher-centric, classroom-based model for learning is being challenged by society and technology on all fronts. Web 2.0 technologies are changing the paradigm for learning from filling individual learners' heads with knowledge to tuning networks of experienced individuals to a given problem or opportunity. None of us is as smart as all of us, and the readwrite Web provides a platform for real-time collaborative learning on a scale previously unimaginable.
Learning is going mainstream within and outside the modern day enterprise, and the training function is being left behind. Today, insights drive profits. These insights are generated from knowledge accidents: that magic moment when expertise collides with opportunity, and whole new industries are born. In today's enterprise ecosystem, information is the currency, people are the transport mechanism, conversation is the transfer mechanism, and co-creation is the value-generation mechanism. In this kind of generative learning environment, the role of the traditional training function becomes increasingly marginalized, and speeding it up with technology merely accelerates the visibility of its shortcomings to drive generative learning and, by association, enterprise profitability.
So what to do? Not surprisingly, yet another adage comes to mind here: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Become part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Get yourself a blog, manage projects with wikis, explore tag clouds and imagine how they might one day render competency models obsolete. Use Google Reader to get the latest insights from the new learning frontier pushed to you every minute of every day. Get on Facebook and Myspace and learn how collaborative cocreation is facilitated by these technologies.
But don't stop there. Enter the third dimension by getting yourself an avatar. Explore Second Life or There.com, play World of Warcraft with your kids to experience how they are learning to lead, decide, and innovate virtually at an alarmingly rapid pace.
We are all aware of the knowing-doing gap. Reverse the gap. Start with doing. Use these technologies in your own domain first. Your experience in use will change how you think about how to leverage these technologies to help your enterprise learn and grow. The do-nothing alternative ensures that the training function’s balloon will shrink and the opportunity we have before us to redefine our value proposition to the enterprise will be forever lost. Technology has forever changed business. Now it is time for it to redefine learning. This is my call to action for all training professionals to join the Webvolution.
Tony O'Driscoll is professor of the practice, Duke
University’s Fuqua School of Business. To stay current
on his insights and research, visit his Learning
Matters blog at www.wadatripp.wordpress.com.
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