CommLog

A Few Thoughts About Learning

While doing a little light reading on systems thinking, I came across a quote I really like—“ Nothing inhibits future success like making procedures to formalize what generated a previous success.”

In The Art of Systems Thinking, O’Connor and McDermott remind us that what we often hail as a success was really a break-through—a new way of thinking—which comes from a change in one of our mental models. Once a break-through is formalized and institutionalized it becomes the norm—and we tend not to question it or give it any further thought. This is especially true when our organizations select people who act and think like the existing team. No one questions the norms. The risk? Nothing changes and over time the system runs down.

So, what can we do to avoid organizational decay? O’Connor and McDermott offer thoughts on two types of learning—simple learning and generative learning. Simple learning takes place when we change what we do in response to the results and feedback we get—for example, making changes to your operations based on the results of a satisfaction survey completed by your customers. It’s important to do this—and it’s a good way to get better and/or more efficient at what you already do.

However, if you’re really looking for the change, revitalization, and innovations needed to stave off decay, you need to foster generative learning. Generative learning happens when we let feedback change our mental models—that is, change our deeply rooted assumptions and our way of looking at things—an essential if you need to solve big problems and drive your business toward a changing future.

(Source: The Art of Systems Thinking, Joseph O’Connor & Ian McDermott)

Intranet Trends

CIO columnist Shiv Singh outlines seven Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006.

Some excerpts:

1. The Intranet grows up and makes new friends
   

   For example, corporate e-mail, telephony, mobile warrior applications, virtual team rooms, executive dashboards and enterprise intranets are distinct tools with independent owners, budgets and business cases behind them today. However, in the not too distant future, you’ll have a single, integrated voice and data interface that will combine these tools in a dynamic, natural and adaptive manner. IDC calls this coming consolidation the Enterprise Workplace while Forrester refers to it as the information workplace. Irrespective of what you may call it, expect the trend to hit you in the next two to three years.

2. Intranet ROI will be pushed to the back burner
   When was the last time your management team asked you to create an ROI model for corporate e-mail? It was probably quite some time ago. In contrast to e-mail, intranet managers have often been asked to justify investments in their company intranet. Well, there’s good news. In the future, senior executives will be less concerned about the tangible ROI of an intranet. It will be an assumed cost of doing business, just as corporate e-mail has become.
3. Expect Intranets to become even more pervasive
   

   Expect to see many more dynamic, innovative intranets in the near future, whether they’re servicing the board members of a Fortune 500 company or farmers in a developing country. Also, expect to be challenged to deliver more dynamic and innovative intranet solutions for your employees and business partners.

4. The user experience matters at last
   

   IDC explains this trend as a new “user experience platform” that is emerging to improve the lives of information workers integrating existing intranets and transactional applications. And as an intranet manager, this is good. A few years ago, employees barely cared about their company intranets. Today, they’re using their intranets so much that they expect them to have the simplicity and usability of Google or Yahoo! Furthermore, in many large companies, the intranet serves as the official face of the company. Companies with unusable and complex intranets are doing a huge disservice to their employees.

5. The Ajax revolution hits the intranet
   

   Now imagine a physical map of your office on your intranet. But also imagine that you could scroll around it, click on a graphic of a desk and get a person’s name, designation and contact information right away. And imagine if by clicking on his or her name, you got a listing of all the recent e-mails sent to you by that person. Or imagine an application on your intranet that has built-in calculators that let you quickly calculate your ideal monthly 401k contributions and depict the results in a graph without requiring several pages to load. And imagine if the graph could be manipulated in real time. That’s the power of Ajax.

6. Blogs come and go but RSS will remain
   

   The related technology to continue to keep an eye on is Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Companies that embrace RSS as a content format and use it to publish information to employees will have far greater success than with blogging alone. Enabling employees to subscribe to subject and department specific RSS feeds and then view them via readers will enable more targeted, community focused conversations in the workplace. And the ease with which postings can be viewed in an RSS reader will encourage more employees to participate. For RSS to be adopted however, companies will have to let their employees subscribe to both internal and external RSS feeds. If this happens, then I believe that in some companies blogging combined with wide adoption of RSS readers will become even more relevant than the company intranet.

7. Wikis gain prominence and get integrated
   

   In a similar fashion to blogs, wikis do have a role in the workplace but only if they’re used for the right purpose and if they have the right culture to flourish in. Many smaller, less structured companies have embraced wikis as their intranet technology platform. For these organizations with flatter, less formal hierarchies, the self correcting mechanisms of a wiki create the right balance of empowering the employees to share and preventing things from spinning out of control. After all, each time a contributor edits or adds to a page, his or her name appears in the revisions list.

CAUTION: Benchmarking Ahead

“Benchmarking” is being used widely across businesses today. And if companies aren’t using it, they want to be, or perhaps, feel they ought to be. But do you have appropriate standards in place to implement benchmarking? Let’s say you conduct a “benchmarking survey” to compare the “numbers” in your company to the “numbers” of other companies. You find your company has more favorable numbers in all areas but one. Sounds good, right? So you report these findings back to management. Sighs of relief that “everything is just fine” may give leadership that warm, fuzzy feeling, while in reality these findings mean little more than you’re the best of a mediocre group. If mediocrity is in fact what you are striving for, congratulations, you’ve achieved it. Is this what you’re trying to accomplish?

If your answer is no, and your benchmarking agenda entails discovering and incorporating best practices, you may want to dig a little deeper. Benchmarking should not be a comparison check. Benchmarking should be used as an improvement process. You should be searching for best practices, what the standards are, and who sets them. But you should also be interested in how those people meet the standards and why those practices are “best.”

Remember to think before you leap. Here’s a link that may help to guide you along your benchmarking way.   

Ten Benchmarking Mistakes to Avoid