Natural Knowledge Flows

I need to take a quick time out from world flatness to discuss a recent article in CLO Mag entitled Making Rapid E-Learning Work, by Josh Bersin.

Let me start by reiterating my previous comments about Josh—he gets it. Josh has a solid understanding of Rapid eLearning—the business imperatives that drive it, the adoption trends, growth projections, and where it fits in the full spectrum of learning from informal to formal. Josh understand that different methods are appropriate to address different circumstances, objectives, learners, and subjects. His description and analysis of where it fits in the spectrum is on target. The article is a must read if you haven’t read his paper on the subject (for sale) on his website.

But even Josh may have fallen into the trap of thinking about learning and courses as being the same. He states: “The key to successful rapid e-learning is having tools and templates that make it easy for virtually any professional to quickly create a meaningful course.” Rapid eLearning does not generally serve the same purpose as courseware with all the bells and whistles of instructional design, testing, tracking, etc. We don’t need SMEs to create more “courses”—we need them to share their knowledge, quickly and easily.

Since the most common way for SMEs to share their knowledge one to many in organizations is by giving presentations (not by building courses), the key to successful Rapid eLearning is capturing those presentations, whenever and wherever they occur—and making them quickly and easily accessible to those who need them. Relying on every SME in a large company record their own individual presentations whenever they feel the need to communicate, using one of a growing number of self-production tools, is certainly one way to do it. But the more practical and effective way, used by Cisco Systems and a number of other leading companies, is to identify the “natural knowledge flows” in the organization and capture the knowledge as it is already being transferred. Examples of mission-critical, pre-established knowledge flows include: new product introduction seminars, sales meetings, technical transfers of information, web-conferences, etc.

The key knowledge in any organization has got to already be flowing somewhere, more or less effectively, or the organization could not function. The trick is to identify those flows and be there to capture them. Some companies have designated meeting or conference rooms they routinely use to transfer knowledge. Some use whatever meeting facilitates are available. Some companies use web conferencing and conference calls, and most use all of the above. In a Rapid eLearning world, the secret is knowing where and when the knowledge is flowing and be there to record it one way or another.

Enabling SMEs to create their own learning content is a great thing, no doubt about it, and Josh is a great cheer leader for this important development. This trend will continue to grow in this era of the “democratization” of content and learning, where everyone can be a publisher, collaborator, and a learner. But self-production is usually not sufficient to ensure that the critical IP is systematically captured and made available to the many audiences that nee it. A robust Rapid eLearning strategy and infrastructure must be focused on a company’s critical knowledge flows and designed to accommodate the variety of ways knowledge is transferred on a daily basis.