The Power of Us

Speaking of the world being flat, and for those of you who don’t have the time or patience to wade through 500 pages of Tom Friedman’s tome, here’s a great article that says the same thing—but in a way that seems much more immediate and personal to tech-savy readers.

My friend, colleague, and fellow eLearning Forum Board member, Eilif Trondsen, just forwarded me the link to the Business Week article: The Power of Us: Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business—and I wanted to pass it on immediately. The article discusses bright new companies (including Meiosys, Skype, Kazaa, Bit Torrent, and obviously Google) that are taking advantage of mass collaboration and disparate new technologies to shake up their respective industries—ranging from entertainment to telecommunications. And industry giants, like Proctor & Gamble and Dow Corning, are “becoming much more porous and decentralized” to speed up product innovation through the intentional “democratization of science.”

Here’s but a sampling of the excited phrases uttered by the editors of BW: there’s a fundamental shift in power happening; peer power; sweeping changes; new economic order; economics of networks; sea change in the economy; new market ecology; citizen journalists and participatory journalism; personalized products; and the cornucopia of the commons.

The discussion of “peer production” is particularly interesting and relevant to the training and learning business. File sharing, blogs, wikis, social networking systems, and many other disparate Internet-enabled technologies are, in the words of publisher Tim O’Reilly, creating an “architecture of participation.” And quote eBay’s Meg Whitman makes the power of peer production even more poignant: “It is far better to have an army of a million than a command and control system.” To contend with this “rising people power,” the article concludes, “corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant.”

Bringing this a little closer to home I would say, to contend with this rising people power, training departments and learning professionals will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. Far better to have an army of employees sharing their knowledge so that all can learn, than a command and control system of structured curricula, instructional design methodology, and learning management systems. The democratization of learning content is the next disruptive wave for enterprise learning—let’s start paddling furiously now so we can catch it and ride it into shore!