Today I got locked out of one of my online credit card accounts. My fault: I’ve got too many usernames to cover my split personalities. A box popped up asking me if I wanted live help. You betcha. This saved me time and strengthened my relationship with the bank. Thanks, Edward.

I’ve long advocated treating workers/learners as customers. If a stingy bank can justify providing a service to its customers, it’s probably inexpensive enough to provide to our internal customers. Why shouldn’t live help boxes be available on, for instance, new-hire on-ramps? Or in-house knowledge repositories? Or anywhere people in search of critical information may get lost?

Thinking you can’t afford it? I’ll suggest you can’t not afford it.

What’s a knowledge worker cost these days? For the sake of argument, let’s say $60,000 salary plus benefits, equipment, expenses, and so forth, a total of $80,000. If our worker is making sales or helping customers, what you pay them is the tip of the iceberg; the value of their lost time should be measured in sales not made or service not provided. If our average front-line performer does not have an opportunity cost of at least $200,000 /year, you need to find more productive workers.

If average, knowledge workers spend a third of her time looking for answers. Every case is different. Maybe your organization is so together that your number is 10%. You do the math. The cost/benefit ratio is so compelling that were I a CLO, I’d be asking for justification for not providing realtime help.

I went to Live Person, one of the first online live help software providers. Long ago, I had a Live Person chat box at Internet Time, but that’s another story. Today, they have a case study featuring National City Bank.

It’s not hard to imagine adding this sort of thing at the crossroads of your learning and knowledge management systems, is it? This is a no-brainer. Well, maybe not always. National City has been in the news this week.

My early warning system is flashing, signaling that it’s time for business people to play a new game or take early retirement. Why the urgency? Because The object of the game is survival, and that requires crossing the great divide between where we are now and where we need to be a year from now.

We’ve lived on the left side of the divide for centuries. Enormous successes have lulled us into a complacent rhythm. We have wrought miracles: electrification, electronics, bio-tech, computers, television, mass production, biotech, trains, planes, and automobiles: you name it. I sent a letter by FedEx yesterday; scan - blip - look-up - and it will be on the other side of the country tomorrow; I shook my head and said to no one in particular, “I’m amazed that this works.”

Nonetheless, it’s time to move on. Everything is going faster, swinging further out of normal limits, and behaving erratically. We’re ripping along so fast that the wheels are about to fall off. Think demise of the planet, using up irreplaceable resources, turning up the heat, weapons of mass destruction (unlike Iraq, we have real ones), tribal and religious hatred, etc., etc., etc. This is entropy.

You cannot get to the other side incrementally. It’s the old conundrum of not being able to solve a problem when trapped in the same frame that created it. This is a phase change. You only get through it by taking a death-defying leap of imagination and courage. No matter how much you improve a motorcycle, you are not going to turn it into an airplane.

All is for naught if we can’t get to the other side. Sure, the lug-nut businesses will help keep the wheels on a little longer (and put food on the table, too), but the main event will be preparing people and organizations to take the big leap.

Here are some lessons learned from my interviews last week with a company that lives and breathes community.

Few people willingly change the basic way they send and receive information. Email messaging is more likely to take hold than a portal.

Internet software travels with an invisible companion, the memes and processes I call internet culture. The net is an environment for sharing, optimism, and friendliness.

In email and on blogs, people speak conversationally, absent the officiousness of a traditional business memo.

Behind the firewall, behavior is casual but professional. People don’t foul their nest.

Live on the web inside your organization to learn lessons to share with your customers.

People who don’t visibly take part in virtual communities are not lurkers; they are silent partners. Thank goodness, for otherwise everyone would be talking at once.

Group membership should be selective. A couple of hundred people is a common group limit to growth.

Filter out the noise of mediocre and erroneous elements of raw knowledge to increase the fidelity of the knowledge flow.

People will read ten messages embedded in a weekly email. They will not read thirty.

Don’t think learning; this is raising collective intelligence.

Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a college student asking about informal learning. I am generous in answering thoughtful inquiries, but I do not intend to rob students of learning experiences by doing their thinking for them.

Teachers give assignments to help students learn. Cutting and pasting the results of Google searches until they resemble a paper you might have written saves you time and effort at the expense of your learning. Learning requires reflection. This takes more effort the first few times you try it but saves time in the long run. When you learn, from there on you’ll be building on what you already know instead of continually reinventing the wheel. Unless you’re preparing for a career doing simplistic searches on the net, don’t game the system.

If you are a student, study. Getting answers is easy. Asking the right questions is hard. Read How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric Raymond and Rich Moen. It taught me enough social engineering to get better answers quicker and with less waste.

This arrived in my morning email:

Hi my name is ___, i am a 3rd year student at ____ University studying educational studies i graduate this summer, my final assignment module is informal learning and i have to write a report on the evaluation of an effective informal learning context for learning, included observations and research methods. I was researching and came across your website and you seem extremely knowledgeable in this area, i would be extremely grafeful if you could suggest any interesting ideas, or previously research simliar to this because i am struggling to come up with a creative idea.

This email is more cordial than most but I don’t know what she’s really asking for. A creative idea? How about “What have I learned outside of class and what did it get me?”

Over the weekend, I had visited the wiki for a course on informal learning that the instructor had invited me to review. Here’s the first entry on informal learning:

If Cross suggests that informal learning should be learned through doing then what is the purpose in publishing a book on the subject? Wouldn’t a more effective way of disseminating the information be through a web site or similar sort of collaborative learning tool that everyone could add to? Maybe that’s what the website Informl was supposed to be. When I visisted the site, however, I was unable to efficiently find any information about informal learning and some parts of the web site returned an error message. I think wikis are a pretty good tool for informal learning - they allow collaboration and also are easily searchable. Maybe this should have been the format of the informl website instead.

Having once been a wise-ass college student myself, I don’t mind the snarky attitude. I do find it troubling when a student makes specious observations that end up inhibiting learning. Hence, I responded:

Permit me to offer a few suggestions for navigating the informl website. Look in the righthand column for the link to my wiki. From there, click informal learning, and you’ll find a YouTube explanation, a summary of informal learning, a poster about informal learning, the introduction to the book, lists of references, the first three chapters in their entirety, links to eight articles, descriptions of informal learning tools, and a list of books that influenced my thinking. Most of my major web pages contain a search engine for ten years of my blog posts, a link to articles, and a link to a discussion community. When you’re surfing one of the oldest sites about learning on the web, expect a few 404s; link rot happens.

Frankly, I am amazed you could visit the site and not find informal learning. Where were you looking?

Being a champion of informal learning doesn’t make me think that formal study should be lackadaisical.

Join the Fieldbook project.

The Story of Stuff is a twenty-minute animated movie about the sources of pollution and what to do about them.

This won’t have the impact of An Inconvenient Truth, Greenpeace, or Silent Spring. On the other hand, those eat up a couple of hours to a couple of years of your time.

Most people will never invest the time to listen to Al Gore or Rachel Carson.

The message per minute of The Story of Stuff is tough to beat.

Esse quam videri, Latin for “To be rather than to seem,” is the motto of North Carolina and my advice to CLOs. Presenters at training conferences say you can earn a seat at the table by speaking the language of business, expressing your ROI in hard dollars, and relating your learning initiatives to business goals. They are wrong.

Many training managers try to have it both ways. They pepper their speech with business buzzwords but deep inside beats the heart of a trainer. When push comes to shove, they prefer instruction to self-discovery and instructional design to business strategy.

Speakers at training conferences mouth the mantras they imagine to be politically correct among senior managers. They revisit the same old stories again and again, as if repetition makes them useful. The generic version goes like this:

In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s more important than ever not only to stay attuned to organizational needs but also to heed what’s going on in the greater world outside. Leaders (like you) need insight and foresight to recognize the signs of change, understand broader trends, make enlightened decisions, and innovate to create competitive advantage.

Continue reading →

When it comes to visual thinking, they don’t come any better than Dave Gray.

Don’t go to his new site for the standard 20-second hit-and-run skim. The beauty of the design and clarity of message will force you to stay a while. Check out From Presentations to Conversations. This is informal learning in the flesh, and the opening photo has nothing to do with my admiration for Dave’s work on this:

(Big Apple)

I plan to celebrate Easter tomorrow looking for eggs in the aisles of Jet Blue 100 from Oakland to New York.

Tuesday morning, Allison Rossett, Marc Rosenberg, and I participate in a free one-day event at the Harvard Club of New York. Wednesday I take the Acela Express to Washington to spend a few days with friends and Mom.

Get in touch if you’d like to arrange a rendezvous.