Craig Malloy is CEO of Bloomfire, an Austin-based company that offers knowledge-sharing tools for teams and organizations. Craig previously served as founder and CEO of ViaVideo (acquired by Polycom), founder and CEO of LifeSize (acquired by Logitech), and is a former U.S. Navy officer.
The latest learning and education innovations are blossoming, even if they have yet to gain meaningful adoption. Just take a look at the ideas, tools, and methods currently available. There's the flipped classroom like Khan Academy, Harvard and MIT's online education venture edX; adaptive and personalized learning from Knewton; gamification; educational content and experiences for mobile devices like Inkling or Apple's textbook publishing. The list goes on and on.
Yet, the way we learn in corporate environments hasn't changed in decades. We still attend weekend training sessions, read sales manuals, and watch taped lectures. Right now, organizational knowledge sharing forces people to learn from 'expert material' – - the manual, the binder, and the video.
That should shift to learning from teammates and co-workers. We need to incorporate the innovation we're seeing in education technology into the business world, and do it in a way that is designed for business use cases, not academic. Here are the principles for making that happen
1. Pull Beats Push Every Time
What if we could re-imagine corporate training? What kind of a system would we create? Would there be scheduled trainings or weekend retreats?
Today, organizations spend countless hours and dollars on pushing knowledge at their teams with the hope that they'll be able to retain it and recall it at the right moment. Instead, we should be using systems that let us retrieve what we need, at the moment we need it.
Khan Academy and MIT's OpenCourseWare project do exactly this. They create environments where learners can get the knowledge and concepts when they are ready to learn it. Students practice, watch instructional videos, ask questions, and take quizzes at their own pace.
Think about how you compulsively Google for information that you probably could have recalled if you thought about it long enough. Why isn't there a corporate equivalent for that? Even savvy businesses with a good knowledge base can't scale to provide every piece of information an employee might need.
If you take a pull-not-push approach, it means you provide both an enduring body of content/knowledge such as videos and documents, along with an easy means of connection to other employees that have the knowledge you need at the moment that you need it.
2. Everyone Has Something Valuable to Contribute
Everyone does, in fact, have something to contribute. Let's use sales teams as an example. Most salespeople in large organizations are starving for information. They get together once a year at a sales meeting and spend the entire time talking to each other to find out what they're all doing — what works and what doesn't.
Unfortunately, most of these sales meetings are filled with top-down presentations and dune buggy rides. While these are great, what the sales force really needs is collaboration among their colleagues. They want to share best practices and swap tips, all at or near real time.
This is your organization's most valuable resource — the latent knowledge stored in the experience and interaction among your teammates and co-workers.
This is why it's important to open up the learning process and allow anyone to make a contribution via peer lessons. Plus, because of the context, peer lessons are often the most important and sticky lessons we learn.
Peer learning environments like Peer2Peer University and Udemy are extreme examples of the 'learn anything from anyone, anytime' trend. Anyone can sign up to take a course, or to teach one. The value of the course isn't from the 'expertise' of the instructor so much as the interaction with capable and motivated peers.
But it's not just a tool-level issue. If you're going to take advantage of this approach, you need to embed it as a value at the core of your company culture. Everyone from the intern to the CEO needs to agree and believe that they have something valuable to contribute. Once you've instilled that value in your culture, the benefits start to multiply.
3. None Of Us Is as Smart as All of Us
An average employee spends nine hours per week searching for information. This is too much wasted time and speaks to the failure of our current knowledge sharing systems and techniques. We should be spending less time searching for the answers, more time putting them into practice, and iterating on the results.
What if the expert, lesson or knowledge was just a couple of clicks away? Quora, the question-and-answer platform that recently raised $50 million, aims to be a trusted source of answers to any question one might have.
In education, Piazza — the online Q&A platform for students and instructors — is showing some astonishing engagement numbers. Average response times to questions are typically between ten and twenty minutes.
Social business software tries to solve this problem. But the casual and informal nature of these interactions doesn't encourage prompt responses to questions. It's not uncommon for questions to go unanswered, lost in the growing pile of status updates.
As with iPads, when it comes to corporate knowledge sharing, it's best if the technology just gets out of the way.
To encourage participation, don't bury your learning content behind a firewall where nobody can access it. If someone has to VPN in to your system, they're probably not going to collaborate in real time. You need to get those access barriers out of the way.
Second, you need to get a feel for the typical workflow of your employees so that you can optimize your learning strategy for their unique work style. What apps do they use? Are they using email a lot? How much of their time is spent on the go, or in the office, together? Once you get a firm grasp of how your teams like to work, you can start to implement tools that make sense for them.
4. Learn or Die
We've spent too much time in recent years doing social media for social media's sake. We've spent too much time talking about activity streams, likes, and other small features.
If learning has not switched from push to pull, is not peer centered, and you don't do it as fast as possible, do you really believe one social network is going to solve your problem? It won't.
After all, behind most business problems is a learning problem, and these three principles can make all the difference in whether your organization's knowledge-sharing program is static and stale, or whether it is a thriving, dynamic resource that pumps up the bottom line. The gist is this: Any company that wants to flourish must learn or die.
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