The Learnstream of Jay Cross

ew Ideas / by Joe Kloc / February 17, 2009

Oxytocin emerges as a key player in our facility for social memory.

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Given only a small dose of oxytocin, individuals in a recent study found that their memory significantly improved. Not for historical dates, strings of digits, or bars of music, but for something much more significant: each other.

“We consider faces the most basic class of social stimulus,” says Ulrike Rimmele, who led the study at the University of Zurich. Oxytocin’s ability to exclusively enhance the recollection of faces points to an important distinction between different types of memory. Social memory — which we use to remember people — is distinct from other types of memory required to store dates, numbers, and objects.

Social learning? Take a swig of this stuff.

This morning brings a new relationship in the Enterprise 2.0 Services arena: Hinchcliffe and Co, an enterprise ‘web 2.0’ consulting and education provider, Asuret, an enterprise risk mitigation software and services provider and Socialtext, a social software provider join forces to deliver the first stack of services and software to take organizations through planning and technical implementation of social software projects.

Together, this alliance is set up to offer requirements and technical design, the necessary project risk management levers and finally, a well respected software suite to bring it all to life. Coming out at the customer end are solutions for social collaboration, intranet redesigns, customer communities, corporate social media, Social CRM and finally Business and Industry Social Networks.

As seen in the diagram below, the overall stack of service covers includes architecture and design, technology selection and application, as well as project management.

To compliment methodology and implementation experience brought about by Hinchcliffe and Co., the Asuret software + consulting service offers project risk management methodologies and processes to identify pressure points that can derail engagements in areas of stakeholder alignment, executive sponsorship, project management, business case and the like.

The promise of this alliance centers on the reality that in many cases adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools today is low and that most organizations are still learning the social computing ropes.

The TED Commandments.” I had never seen these before but ran across them on Garr Reynolds’ PresentationZen blog. (And by the way, Garr’s blog is a must-read if you do any public speaking.)

These are helpful to any presenter in any situation. I commend them to thee for thine edification:

1. Thou shalt not simply trot out thy usual shtick.
2. Thou shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wondrous new thing, or share something thou hast never shared before.
3. Thou shalt reveal thy curiosity and thy passion.
4. Thou shalt tell a story.
5. Thou shalt freely comment on the utterances of other speakers for the sake of blessed connection and exquisite controversy.
6. Thou shalt not flaunt thine ego. Be thou vulnerable. Speak of thy failure as well as thy success.
7. Thou shalt not sell from the stage: neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding; lest thou be cast aside into outer darkness.
8. Thou shalt remember all the while: laughter is good.
9. Thou shalt not read thy speech.
10. Thou shalt not steal the time of them that follow thee.

LearnTrends 2009 is going to be awesome.

Yesterday I drew up the tentative agenda. Our theme is convergence in corporate learning. We aim to explore how to corral the loose pieces of learning technology, both on the web and off, in order to come up with a unified, targeted strategy for moving forward.

These people…

…will be addressing these topics:

Convergence in Learning

Extending Learning to the Edges of Organizations
Building a Social Learning Environment
Merging Information, Media, and Social Learning
Personal Knowledge Management
The LearnTrends Innovation Awards
The Immernet Singularity: How the Immersive Internet Will Redefine Learning and Collaboration
Reinventing organizational learning
Breaking down walls
Microlearning: Beyond Learning Objects and Just-in-time Performance Support
The Challenge of Convergence – Approaches for Getting Learning and Support Where Its Needed
Enterprise 2.0, Convergence, and Innovation
Convergence and Web Squared
Common tools for diverse communities at Xerox Global Services
E-learning outside the training box

Registration is free. Sign up to receive a few email updates. Check the Agenda on the LearnTrends 2009 tab. Put this on your calendar today.

Rummler and Brache: Improving Performance

November 25th, 2008

Series: Managing the White Space

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Following the recent death of co-author Geary Rummler, I’m reading Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart.   This post is the first in a series based on that book and on the implications of that white space.

I’ve read a lot of what Rummler wrote; I took the Performance Analysis Workshop he and Tom Gilbert designed; I was lucky enough to be invited to a Rummler-led session for PAW grads (where I saw among other things a professional-development system for officers on an ocean freighter).   I often work within a single department of a client organization and often with people on the front line, where the organization meets its external customers.  Going through this book, as they say in Congress, “revises and extends” my viewpoint.

Geary Rummler and Alan Brache argue that true performance improvement demands a systematic view of the entire organization.

Rachel Happe on Community Maturity Model

October 15th, 2009 — Community

Jay’s notes on webinar presentation with Rachel Happe, co-founder of The Community Roundtable. See Rachel’s slides for what to do about each of topics. She has a great array of how-to tips.

The Community Roundtable is a virtual table where social media and community practitioners gather to meet, discuss challenges, celebrate successes, and hear from experts. Along with providing a welcoming environment in which to gather and learn, The Community Roundtable is dedicated to furthering the discipline of community management. We are a great resource for community and social media managers looking for:

• Peers that understand and can help navigate day-to-day challenges
• Content focused on the unique needs of the practitioner and not on the latest top 10 list
• Programs that help with both tactical needs and with strategic thinking

54% of companies Ban Social Media

 

How typical is this?

The consistency of corporate IT reactionaries is very reassuring. For the study below, you can substitute almost every innovation over the last 30ys. Anyone around that long remembers the ‘ban’ on minicomputers, personal computers, the WWW, etc.

In fact, the granddaddy of all enterprise social network applications, employee email, was ‘banned’ for a decade or more. Now, this lowly social media, is considered the most important mission-critical enterprise application by CIOs and enterprise leadership.

The social network reorientation of work, wealth-creation and well-being marches on (in spite of corporate governance.)

How Addicting is Social Media?

Do you tweet while driving? How about on vacation, or at work? Ever wonder how much time others are spending tapping away on their mobile phone, texting a friend, checking in on Facebook, posting a tweet on Twitter, or using any of the many social media services? A recent Gadgetology study by consumer electronics shopping site, Retrevo.com went looking for answers on how much control social media has on peoples’ lives. We weren’t entirely surprised to learn how addictive social media has become especially among the 35 and younger crowd. We're no social psychologists but it looks like a whole generation (or two) is at risk of spending so much time texting, checking Facebook, using Twitter and other mobile social media services as to risk becoming addicted.

How Many Times a Day?

If you feel guilty for checking in on Facebook or Twitter a few times a day, don’t worry, it’s normal behavior, according to Retrevo's study, most people check Facebook and Twitter a couple of times a day. However, when we looked at the under 35 year olds we were concerned to see 27% of them checking Facebook more than 10 times a day. Could this be a sign of a growing addiction to social media? How many times a day do you check Facebook?

Everywhere You Go? We asked our sample of gadget-savvy online individuals how much they used social media in various settings. Turns out there is a big difference between those 35 and younger and those older than 35. The older crowd indicated they spend a reasonable amount of time checking in on social media services while the younger set spends what seems like an awful lot of hours texting, and checking in with their social media sites everywhere they are whether it's in the car, at work, on vacation, or even after sex. Do you tweet/text/check-facebook often?

The Big Enablers If you want to point a finger at one of the big causes of this wave of social media addiction look no further than smartphones and other mobile devices. In the Gadgetology study only 19% of the older set (35+) use a phone as the preferred device for social media services with 81% preferring instead a desktop or laptop computer. Over on the other side of the generation gap we found 46% of those younger than 35 indicating their preference for a mobile device for all things social media. What is your preferred device for checking facebook?

Campus resorts?

October 4th, 2009 — Innovation, history

“Jay, given what you’ve just told us, what do you think will happen to colleges?”

“You mean the campuses? I think many of today’s campuses will make swell resorts and hotels.”