The Learnstream of Jay Cross

More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.

Unfortunately, few have thought very hard about managing these initiatives. In a classic case or "ready, fire, aim," companies are committing resources to social media efforts with very little process behind them. The result? A hodgepodge of unrelated initiatives, wheels re-invented and resources wasted.

The Corporate Executive Board has found that the best companies recognize that social media are just another set of promising tools and as such are to be understood, mastered, and used efficiently. Importantly, they also recognize that how they manage their social media efforts depends on where they are in the journey from initial discovery to mainstream use. That journey has three stages:

• Discovery: At this stage, the organization is just finding out about the potential uses (and risks) of social media for its purposes and making initial forays. The goal: understanding ("could this work for us?"). Since few resources are necessary at this point, companies don't need heavy managerial oversight. But they do need downside protection. Clear, well-communicated policies on everything from information sharing to appropriate language is in order.

• Experimentation: As an organization does more with social media, the importance of learning efficiently becomes urgent. At this point, companies need tighter oversight and coordination of efforts. There are a number of ways to create that kind of transparency and sharing, ranging from steering committees to tiger teams" to social media czars. These bodies should develop and steward a learning agenda for the firm's efforts, using each initiative to deliberately increase the institutional knowledge of social media use.

Measurement standards also become more important at this stage. The best companies settle on a consistent set of measures for similar initiatives, using that data to test and learn over time. Metrics like track-backs, for example, can clarify better or worse social media vehicles for a given objective.

• Adoption: While few companies currently find themselves in this stage, those that do loosen their managerial posture, moving away from oversight toward support. Here, the role of any central or dedicated management body should be one of education, coaching and provision of expertise. Some firms are building centers of excellence, repositories of people and knowledge about using social media. Metrics should shift here too, tailored for assessing efficiency and effectiveness of specific initiatives.

Concepts

Click the concept name to reveal more information and an example presentation.

Age of Real-Time We are moving from the industrial era of speed to the digital age of real-time. New tools and processes enabling real-time simultaneous activities change the way how we run our organizations.		Digital Ecosystems The digital business environment should be seen as an ecosystem of networked actors, blending natural-, computer- and social sciences into a coherent business strategy for the digital age.
Extended Events In a typical traditional conference, content is static, organization is top-down and audience is passive. With social technologies it’s possible to make events more social before, during and after an event. Truly understanding the technologically empowered community around any event makes extended events possible.	Organic Enterprise In the post-industrial era, organizations consist of networked creative individuals engaging themselves in interaction with human and non-human appliances. Leading organizations are like organisms who understand social technologies & creative interactive work as central for increasing efficiency through effectiveness.
Real-Time Web The web is moving from static pages to streams of information that we tap into rather than collect and consume. The real-time data is becoming increasingly social, opening new opportunities for organizing group action in a more dynamic way.	Serendipic Learning We move from static and pre-defined learning environments to dynamic and self-organizing informal learning environments. Technologically facilitated serendipity is central for organizing learning around accidental but beneficial encounters.
Social Experiential Learning People learn from experience by reflecting their experiences and through abstraction they create new strategies for experimentation. Social technologies allow reflection and abstraction to happen in an increasingly shared context, enabling individuals to learn from each others’ experiences.	Social Technologies Operative technologies focusing on automation and pre-defined processes were central for the industrial mass-production logic. In the network society social technologies are key for complementing automation with interaction and making pre-defined processes more adaptive and contextual. The road leads towards mass-customization.
Fractal Learning What would learning look like if it could be visualized? Many things in nature and the universe are organized in a fractal pattern. Similarly is learning and how it occurs over our lifetimes. The metaphor of fractal learning makes it concrete how information systems and pattern recognition unlock the keys to life-long learning.

McAfee: I’ve seen about three different major initiatives along those lines, and I think you bring up a really fundamental issue. Most knowledge workers today are very busy people, and if new modes of collaboration become one more thing on their to-do list, we’re not going to get anywhere.

So, three things that I’ve seen that seem to be working are, first of all, making these tools literally just as quick and easy and painless as possible. Exhibit A for me here is Twitter, which I find a phenomenally valuable resource and one that I contribute to fairly often, but that 140-character maximum means that I can’t spend a half-hour composing my Tweet. So, we can make it very quick, very easy, very painless for people to contribute to these kinds of environments. That doesn’t mean that the environment as a whole is trivial as a result. Like I say, I learn a lot and get a huge amount of value off Twitter. If I ask a question in 140 characters, within five minutes, I get a bunch of good answers back. I find that really powerful.

Another thing to do is to move 2.0-style collaboration from above the flow, meaning above the flow of your work—one more thing you have to do—to in the flow of your work. In other words, this is how we are actually going to track status on this project, write this document together, generate this spreadsheet together. This is not in addition to other things we are doing. This is a replacement for what we used to do. The third thing that I’ve seen that works is that if contributing to these platforms is valuable, then measure it and reward people for doing it, put it in performance reviews, make it part of their job.

A Craving for Certainty

When an individual encounters a familiar situation, his or her brain conserves its own energy by shifting into a kind of automatic pilot: it relies on long-established neural connections in the basal ganglia and motor cortex that have, in effect, hardwired this situation and the individual’s response to it. This makes it easy to do what the person has done in the past, and it frees that person to do two things at once; for example, to talk while driving. But the minute the brain registers ambiguity or confusion — if, for example, the car ahead of the driver slams on its brakes — the brain flashes an error signal. With the threat response aroused and working memory diminished, the driver must stop talking and shift full attention to the road.

Uncertainty registers (in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex) as an error, gap, or tension: something that must be corrected before one can feel comfortable again. That is why people crave certainty. Not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating because it requires extra neural energy. This diminishes memory, undermines performance, and disengages people from the present.

Of course, uncertainty is not necessarily debilitating. Mild uncertainty attracts interest and attention: New and challenging situations create a mild threat response, increasing levels of adrenalin and dopamine just enough to spark curiosity and energize people to solve problems. Moreover, different people respond to uncertainty in the world around them in different ways, depending in part on their existing patterns of thought. For example, when that car ahead stops suddenly, the driver who thinks, “What should I do?” is likely to be ineffective, whereas the driver who frames the incident as manageable — “I need to swerve left now because there’s a car on the right” — is well equipped to respond. All of life is uncertain; it is the perception of too much uncertainty that undercuts focus and performance. When perceived uncertainty gets out of hand, people panic and make bad decisions.

Leaders and managers must thus work to create a perception of certainty to build confident and dedicated teams. Sharing business plans, rationales for change, and accurate maps of an organization’s structure promotes this perception. Giving specifics about organizational restructuring helps people feel more confident about a plan, and articulating how decisions are made increases trust. Transparent practices are the foundation on which the perception of certainty rests.

Breaking complex projects down into small steps can also help create the feeling of certainty. Although it’s highly unlikely everything will go as planned, people function better because the project now seems less ambiguous. Like the driver on the road who has enough information to calculate his or her response, an employee focused on a single, manageable aspect of a task is unlikely to be overwhelmed by threat responses.

Understanding the threat and reward response can also help leaders who are trying to implement large-scale change. The track record of failed efforts to spark higher-perfomance behavior has led many managers to conclude that human nature is simply intractable: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Yet neuroscience has also discovered that the human brain is highly plastic. Neural connections can be reformed, new behaviors can be learned, and even the most entrenched behaviors can be modified at any age. The brain will make these shifts only when it is engaged in mindful attention. This is the state of thought associated with observing one’s own mental processes (or, in an organization, stepping back to observe the flow of a conversation as it is happening). Mindfulness requires both serenity and concentration; in a threatened state, people are much more likely to be “mindless.” Their attention is diverted by the threat, and they cannot easily move to self-discovery.

Triggering the Threat Response

One critical thread of research on the social brain starts with the “threat and reward” response, a neurological mechanism that governs a great deal of human behavior. When you encounter something unexpected — a shadow seen from the corner of your eye or a new colleague moving into the office next door — the limbic system (a relatively primitive part of the brain, common to many animals) is aroused. Neuroscientist Evian Gordon refers to this as the “minimize danger, maximize reward” response; he calls it “the fundamental organizing principle of the brain.” Neurons are activated and hormones are released as you seek to learn whether this new entity represents a chance for reward or a potential danger. If the perception is danger, then the response becomes a pure threat response — also known as the fight or flight response, the avoid response, and, in its extreme form, the amygdala hijack, named for a part of the limbic system that can be aroused rapidly and in an emotionally overwhelming way.

This study and many others now emerging have made one thing clear: The human brain is a social organ. Its physiological and neurological reactions are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction. Indeed, as Lieberman puts it, “Most processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest are involved in thinking about other people and yourself.

US researchers have pinned down new differences in the brain chemistry of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

They found ADHD patients lack key proteins which allow them to experience a sense of reward and motivation.

The Brookhaven National Laboratory study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It is hoped it could help in the design of new ways to combat the condition.

Why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars

OK, this summer I've been to a lot of different places. London. New York. Boulder. Seattle. Hollywood. Los Angeles. Indianapolis. San Antonio. In each place it's become obvious how much Twitter has taken over the world. In every city it seems like every business is drinking the Twitter koolaide.

The experiences I'm having with business owners in every city makes me understand some things:

1. Twitter has taken over the business world and this should be very worrying for other companies like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.

2. Twitter is underhyped. I'm now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.

3. Silicon Valley tech bloggers haven't yet put together this pattern, other than by watching traffic numbers which continue to zoom up. Why? Because most of them don't travel very often and don't actually meet with real businesses like restaurants or like the Fiat/Yamaha racing team I'm hanging out with this weekend. When race fans and companies that serve them are excited about Twitter you know the world has shifted.

Work Smarter, new version, <$20

August 4th, 2009 — Informal Learning, The Learning Business

Work Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud

by Jay Cross and Friends
August 2009 Edition, 184 pp. $19.98

Blurb: Informal learning has entered the cloud. Smart companies prosper. Clueless companies die. Brains make the difference. Organizations that continuously exercise and improve their collective brainpower come out on top. This book aims to show you ways to increase your organization’s intelligence. Until recently, the collaboration and learning that fuel the growth of individual and group braininess took place under the radar. My goal is to bring this activity into the sunlight and suggest how to exploit it. This is the August 2009 edition of this unbook.

New since the last edition: essays and latest thinking from the brain trust at togetherLearn.

You won’t find this on Amazon yet.

Time is whipping by so rapidly, this is but this month's dip into the stream.