Learning Conversations

#yam

Social learning, viral marketing, social media, learning ecosystems, communities of practice - all the current buzzwords. Many organisations can see, in principle, what benefits they could extract from the connections between their employees, their customers and the organisation.

Benefits such as:

• Increased creativity
• Being closer to the market's needs
• Increased exposure
• Viral spread of messages

But how you go about it?

Is it about creating strategies, setting targets, implementing systems, measuring return on investment?

Would you do that for conversation?

Of course not.

Realising the potential of the connections within your organisation, and between your organisation and the people outside it, is not about strategies, systems, programmes or any of the other management techniques we've grown up with. It's about culture. [UPDATE: for more on what we mean by culture see Patrick's post - Culture eats strategy for breakfast...]

If you have a culture that learns from mistakes, that devolves responsibility, and expects your people to engage with others about what you do (like the Ministry of Defence?), then you are likely to be pretty strong on the social media front.

If, however, you allow that culture to be blocked by fear, (lack of) trust and control (see Mark Oehlert's and Mark Sylvester's presentation on Slideshare below) then, no matter how much you might want to use "social" strategies, you're probably not going to succeed.

Thanks to Eylan for the stimulus for this post.