The way we do our work affects the way other people do their work.

As such, each person is key to the sustainability of the organization.

Twenty years ago, Peter Senge described the learning organization as a group of people who are continually enhancing their capabilities to create what they want to create.  This concept  has been acknowledged by organisations, and yet, is rarely invested in.

…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to
create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns
of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and
where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

The social learning theory of Albert Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others.  Social Learning has become a contemporary label for transferring knowledge between individuals on a peer to peer basis.  Social technologies provide a technological conduit for peer to peer knowledge sharing to occur.

The culture and behaviors associated with sharing knowledge  through social learning are poorly developed. Social learning is done predominantly  away from the machine.  It takes place in the informal conversations, behaviors and activities that inform the culture. Technology supports and captures but true social learning is witnessed and adopted by human observation.

Steve Flinn is  Managing Director of ManyWorlds, Inc., an intellectual capital design firm that delivers next generation strategic advice, research, content solutions, and author of the recently published ‘The Learning Layer’. Prior to founding ManyWorlds,  Flinn was a Chief Information Officer, as well as a Vice President of Strategy of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, which was, at that time, the most valuable company in the world.  Steve recognizes that learning to learn better is the only sustainable competitive advantage that builds the value generating the possibilities of any business.

Social awareness and learning from experience can now be built into our IT systems and evolve the knowledge within the organisation more efficiently. Engendering the emergence of an entirely new phenomenon, an evolving network of people and knowledge. The result is a system that can recommend the right individual or item of knowledge to the right person at the right time.

Harold Jarche, in his critique of Steve Flinn’s Learning Layer commented,  “The key difficulty I see in the implementation of a learning layer is getting people to use it. As a layer, it is not integrated into the work tools. Even if socially aware systems collect and analyze data and feed these into the learning layer, the layer has to be used by people.”

Tools can only capture what people share.  Sharing needs to be an enculturated process.  If you embed learning into the organisation,  people who want to do their work well, feel incentivised to participate in learning and sharing. Then, you grow a sustainable culture, with people who feel accountable about how they deliver their work.

Learning is always going to be human centric. If you are not enculturing learning in a way that is accessible, participatory, rewarding and sharable; the vision will remain a vision.

Bandura’s social cognitive theory emphasizes the role of observational learning and social experience as significant in building cultural norms. Without creating a culture where learning, sharing and mutual accountability is fundamental, and valued, how can social learning be effectively implemented,  measured or sustained?