CHAPTER 2

Embark on the Journey

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE REQUIRES CULTURE CHANGE, but that’s not the place to start. It’s time to look hard at the aspects of your business that aren’t working and aren’t leading to the results you desire.

For some readers, the problem may be that people in the organization have no modern-day way to work together across standard lines of business, or work effectively with external collaborators and allied organizations. That means they’re disengaged at work, growing increasingly uncomfortable with old-style management. The problem is exacerbated when no one in the organization is stepping up to initiate a large-scale social approach.

For others, collaborative systems may be rolling out, but those who focus on innovation, talent management, human capital, or learning and development haven’t been invited to the table so no one’s making sure discovery and learning are prioritized.

It’s time to lean in. We’ve been there ourselves and have worked with many leaders in similar spots. We know the challenge can be daunting.

In this chapter you’ll find the guidance you need to move forward in either a central or supporting role. Trial and error can be useful, but it can also be terribly painful, and we’re pretty sure you don’t have the time and money to stumble all the way through.

You need a plan that will help you address your organization’s problems, weaving learning into your workplace processes. Designed properly, this won’t make your job more complicated or take more time. It will change how the entire company works and succeeds.

You especially don’t want to create or develop illusory or provisional goals that either disappear or aren’t seen as serious. It’s time to work on the hard problems, to join your colleagues in joyously tackling the most vexing issues, and to come out of the shadows to work out loud.

Euan Semple, who introduced blogging to the BBC and is author of Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web, puts it this way:

As with any new initiative, taking action is critical—even if you know there are umpteen obstacles in your path. New ways of working—and the technologies that come with them—can be challenging, sometimes even frightening. Getting past those challenges requires systematically looking at those barriers and removing, or going around, them.

Get started by figuring out where you are along the social learning spectrum. Does one of these most closely mirror your situation?

Don’t ask.	We’re more likely to stare at our shoes than share openly with other people online.
Toe dippers.	We use social media for marketing, but only a few departments do anything inside the organization with social tools.
Just beginning.	We have a plan in place but haven’t rolled it out completely (or, we had a plan we rolled out but have cut it way back).
On a roll.	We are becoming more social and collaborative each day, but it’s a slow process.
We’ve arrived.	We actively use social tools throughout our organization, our work practices are now relationship oriented, and we’re learning nonstop.

Whichever stage you’re in, it’s time to move further along.

People often struggle to embrace change, but organizations as a whole find it even tougher. Just like the human body, which replaces most of its cells during the course of a few years, organizations regularly handle significant turnover of employees without disruption. Policies and procedures, not to mention surrounding co-workers, are in place to keep things running smoothly when a newcomer shows up. They have co-evolved to reinforce one another, and respond creatively to unexpected events.

Anything less could threaten the organization’s survival and the employees’ livelihoods. So, like the body, organizations have the ability to “heal” from efforts to change from the outside and have developed an “immune system” to resist and recover from changes that have found their way inside. The more frequently change efforts are tried and beaten back, the stronger these defenses become.

Your opportunity is to work within your unique organizational culture, carefully and consciously navigating your organization’s defenses, to help your colleagues understand and embrace a more collaborative, transparent way to work.³

“The days when you could get away with not being noticed at work are passing. Being seen, and being seen to know what you are talking about, are becoming more important.”

—Euan Semple

We aim to help you do that. By looking at hundreds of social implementations across a wide range of industries, taking into account the humanizing element of working in social ways, we have determined the steps we believe you need to take (and not take) in order to break through.

Think of the following list not as a lock-step process, with each stage carefully following the previous one. The order in which you take these steps is only marginally important. Look at them instead as a recipe; one that is flexible and requires you to modify the ingredients to satisfy your local tastes, the available ingredients, your dietary requirements, and climate. Ultimately, what you’re cooking should foster a healthy climate where people can thrive.

Just be sure to start with a clear idea of what you’re creating. As with a recipe, there’s no point beginning until you know if you’re looking for an entree or side dish. Everything else you do should depend on your specific situation.

One-size-fits-all approaches never quite fit right. Your organization gets work done differently than any other. How people communicate and share with each other, and how the relationships between management and staff are structured, sets you apart in every way.

It’s from this unique vantage point—through your own lenses—that you need to look at the work ahead. These are the doors you’ll be going through.

• Get clear about your challenges.

• Determine what’s in it for people.

• Reach out to your partners and stakeholders.

• Identify quick-win opportunities.

• Initiate, seed, and spur on activity.

• Encourage champions.

• Differentiate benefits.

• Establish guidelines and road rules.

• Serve as a positive, visible example.

• Measure things that matter.

• Trust people and share, share, share.

Along your way, you’ll discover many other areas, some seemingly insignificant and others massively important. Provided that you notice when you run into one of these and find a way around, you’re ready to be on your way.

If you’re in that don’t ask phase of the spectrum, this might be where you get off the trolley. Consider looking for a new job with an organization actually committed to moving ahead. While we can’t say the road you’re on is too bumpy for travel—after all, we were all there at some point—there are likely other forces at play.

Maybe your industry is so mired in bureaucracy nothing ever changes. If the CIA can find a way to work in a social and collaborative way some of the time, we no longer accept “we’re in a too tightly regulated industry.”

If you’re in a toe-dipping company, consider there’s a chance it’s not just your marketing department using social tools. In 2014, more than 93 percent of corporate recruiting departments used some social tools.⁴ Look around to find if other groups may have dipped their toes in, too.

Those organizations just beginning are further along than an organization in a similar stage five years ago. With greater than 85 percent of the adult population in North America and Europe using social networking websites, organizations are filled with people who at least understand the value of connecting to learn. Your challenge is to consider how your organizational needs can be addressed in a social way and bridge the gap between capabilities and working solutions.

Organizations we’ve worked with that are on a roll are the most likely to be using social media with parts of their workforce, yet may not have taken the step to focus their attention on learning. Oftentimes, someone has initiated a program to get people talking without actively considering how, with just a little additional effort, they could be identifying what people know and need from one another to make better decisions and go further together. You’re in an ideal position to make that leap.

If you’ve arrived, we invite you to visit the conversation online with others reading this book to talk about what you’re learning and telling us about the amazing journey you’ve been on.

Susan Scrupski, founder of Big Mountain Data, who launched both The 2.0 Adoption Council and Change Agents Worldwide, points out that social software has been used widely in enterprise organizations for nearly a decade. She says, “It’s like a generation has gone through high school and graduated. This isn’t something new anymore. We know what works and what doesn’t.”

With that experience, she says, “The biggest lesson learned is about dealing with the uncertainty that comes from choice. When people have so many choices of where to impart their coveted experience and their precious time, it’s hard not to get distracted from delivering on the organization’s goals.

“You need to create a careful, delicate balance of group interest and self-interest, or the invisible force that holds the network together falters, destabilizes. That invisible force, that magnetism, is trust. It’s up to leaders to discover and foster individuals’ real motivations and work with them on how those can align and support the organization. People are messy, and they can’t be programmed like robots to support company goals that don’t align with their innate human aspirations.”⁶

The following sections outline the work required to begin the journey. Many steps will happen simultaneously, but none can be skipped. They can also all be used again and again to help move your current efforts further along.

Get Clear About Your Challenges

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. We’ve all heard this cliché and know its inherent problems, yet we launch into projects before we clearly look at why we’re setting out in this direction. What’s the pressing business problem, as Edgar Schein asks, we must address to go on?

For OPENPediatrics, the problem was that clinicians didn’t have a way to connect across vast distances. At the CIA, the problem was that people needed to share intelligence at the speed of change. In chapters ahead, you’ll learn more about the problems people have to solve in getting help quickly from peers, how to build a talent pipeline, or understand what leadership looks like. You’ll see how a workforce can learn how to surface innovations and how a global youth movement can create an atmosphere where fresh ideas thrive. At just about every organization we’ve learned from, the overarching theme has been to create a great place for outstanding people to work in smarter ways.

If you’re struggling to figure out which are your most pressing problems, ask yourself and other senior leaders what causes the most heartache or requires the most time and energy to accomplish. What spurs on griping or rework and constantly seems to create new problems? What situations are costing you money, people, and time?

Content curation is an art, not a science. The most useful tool is you.
—Jonathan Henley

Once you list the problems you need to address, pair them with your desired outcome by describing the strategic benefits you expect your company to achieve using social tools.

Trisha Liu, former community manager at Google and HP says, “I learned to always ask, ‘Have you sorted through the noise to discover what’s really important? Can you state your goals?’ If yes, your job will be easier. If not, how can you expect to make good design or program decisions?

“There are two types of goals: organization goals and participant goals. Why is the organization investing time and energy launching, supporting, maintaining, and working in social ways? What does the business hope to get in return? Then, what are people hoping to accomplish by building community and coming together?

“When you know the participant’s goals, you can design the experience, calls to action, and product features to support these goals. People will feel like they are in the right place to do what they set out to do.

“Organizational and participant goals can overlap, even if they don’t look the same on the surface. A corporate goal might be to reduce the number of support tickets in customer support. A participant goal might be to find an answer or solve a problem. The member may not care about ticket deflection, but finding an answer meets both the participant and organizational goal.”⁷

Just looking at the obvious problems isn’t enough, though. Ask yourself and those articulating the problems if the assumptions are correct. Spend a little time gathering real evidence to refute or prove some of the assumptions before you make plans based on what they are. For instance, is the real reason you’re losing young employees because you don’t have modern tools to help them get their work done or, upon talking with 20 employees, do you discover your tools are fine, but your cafeteria food is unhealthy and you expect everyone to put in 70-hour workweeks?

Once you’re clear on the problem you’re trying to solve (and you’ve cleared out the noise), it’s time to consider how and why people will want to join you on this journey and how you will align with their goals.

Determine What’s in It for People

The French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur named its social initiative Project M. With a focus on what’s in it for the employee, M stands for “me” or “moi.” They realized, while their approach provides approximately 600 people across three countries a learning-lab experience with an experimental feel, it was important to encourage employees to think about themselves.

Although some people at Sanofi may think they’ll work at the company for the rest of their careers, fresh perspective comes from looking to the big and open future. Project M provides such a perspective by including an online community called M-Connect, global brainstorming meetings, mentoring, and numerous opportunities for people to connect differently. Through serendipitous interactions and conversations, new ideas are born and take hold.

With artificial intelligence and the likes of IBM Watson on the horizon, there is the very real possibility global competitors will soon have the ability to automate routine tasks and look across vast signals to identify emergent patterns and trends. Those who do will have a significant advantage when it comes to innovation and creativity.

There will be a need for people with higher-order skills. Individuals can choose to go with the flow or they can realize they need to learn new ways of working, with people in different cultures. This will encourage people to make an investment in themselves.

“Have you sorted through the noise to discover what’s really important? Can you state your goals?”

—Trisha Liu

One of the nonnegotiable boundaries that Dany DeGrave, senior director of strategic alignment, expertise, and innovation at Sanofi, and one of the creators of Project M, was given at the outset was that Project M could never be the reason for missing key company milestones or experiencing any delay in deliverables. (They were also not given either funding or head count, which he considers a great advantage because it also means no one can take those away.)

These resource constraints focused DeGrave and his team on fostering an atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration. They found a way to update and redecorate their workplace; for example, with people motivated to put in extra effort, finding discretionary time amid other priorities. DeGrave says, “We want people to have an influence on our environment, which makes them feel good, perform well, and the company will be better off for it.”

Project M removes barriers that people had previously experienced in their work. For example, if something goes wrong, that’s seen as an opportunity to learn, reflect, and share what you and others can do differently next time or in similar situations.

DeGrave, who also has vaccine-related responsibilities, adds, “We want to avoid the typical situation where people are asked to contribute ideas on how to work differently into an idea box, and then never hear about it again. If someone wants to set up a new initiative or test a new approach, if they can find several people who think it is a good idea they have permission to test it out. It’s a ‘Go,’ provided that it is a new way of working, inspiring engagement or unleashes our talents.”

Project M’s primary purpose is “personal learning and engagement—and each of our roles in all of this,” adds DeGrave. “When you go to a party, the host can create a vibrant atmosphere, but if you stand in the corner, you won’t really experience the environment.” Sanofi provides the environment and opens the door to something different, though it’s up to each person to engage and benefit.

If you’re going to start a transformation process, the first question to answer is what you want to become.
—Dave Gray

Sanofi uses what Kevin Prentiss, a speaker and executive advisor on engagement, calls the “Dance Floor Theory.” Prentiss knows that people who are the most engaged aggregate towards the center of the dance floor, close together, where they radiate the most energy. In contrast, people on the edge stand apart from one another, arms crossed. They don’t participate at the same level, nor emit the same energy.

When people who opt in to work on Project M share with their co-workers news of what they’re learning and how they’re working in new ways, they are inviting others on to the dance floor by example. Through self-interest in working in new ways, they’re enhancing group interest, too.

With both the interests of the organization, and those of the people without whom it would not exist in mind, you can now create your roadmap. You wouldn’t dream of building a house without a blueprint to guide its construction or going on a trip without a map to help you find your way. As well, nowadays most of us wouldn’t consider working on the house or going on that road trip alone.

Embarking on the journey requires you to plan to head in the right direction. While you can’t account for every contingency, or document every step, if you do your planning with others, spend some time gathering requirements, and talk through what you’re trying to accomplish together, you can also begin to envision how to get closer to your destination.

Look at the Tools You Already Have

Assess if you have tools in-house that you can use or if you’ll need to get new (or additional) ones. Are you starting from scratch or do you have some tools that can serve your purposes? Do you have a learning management system that really doesn’t support social learning among people or a social network not explicitly for learning—but surely could be used for that purpose, too? Think about how you can leverage what you already have in place and how people familiar with those tools could pitch in.

Also look for technology where, once employees touch it, they understand it because they are familiar with the Internet; because they have used Facebook or Twitter; or because they have already made a personal investment in the learning curve and can immediately begin to use the tools, greatly speeding up adoption.

Rally People for What’s Ahead

Just as looking at the technology you already have is key to gathering requirements, so is considering the people who already have a stake in working in social ways. They have a stake in your success. People are more apt to participate in something they’ve taken an active role in supporting.

One organization created a petition that was posted widely on the intranet and in the halls. It said, “We are in the early stages of creating a social network with blogs, group forums, and status updates for our employees. What will you write about?” Within one week they had hundreds of responses, demonstrating to their senior leaders there was groundswell support for the program and also giving their workforce something to look forward to participating in.

Reach Out to Your Partners and Stakeholders

So much of what needs to be done is in creating the right environment. Not the technical environment, although it’s important as well, but the overall environment. This includes culture, communication, traditions, policy, procedure, processes, incentives, and much more—an environment where people partner and look to one another.

People are like water—in a tight spot they will always find the path of least resistance. But if you intentionally create a path for the water, it will flow naturally.

Rather than viewing people as a necessary part of the organization, see them as the organization itself. External partners and internal stakeholders are fundamental to your success.

Many organizations we’ve worked with find that a steering committee proves very helpful early in their journey. Representatives from different parts of the organization, each with a different sort of stake in the initiative’s success, can help you work through the challenges. Someone from a line division may not immediately grasp how this will affect their interests, but soon they’ll see connections to their goals and be able to align with your desire to address the problems you’ve laid out.

There is no magic formula for how many people, or what departments, or what levels must be involved. Be open to exploring the right mix for your organization and be open to changing that mix frequently until it works. A team of diverse and committed people can serve the interests of not only the individuals who use it, but also the organization as a whole.

Some organizations invite their gatekeepers in right away. Others develop a full plan and then share it with those most likely to want to halt your progress so they can’t stump you with questions for which you haven’t yet considered the options. For some organizations those gatekeepers are the legal or compliance teams. For others it’s human resources or procurement, and for many it’s IT.

Don’t fear the unexpected, embrace it, and use it as your muse.
—Zachary Oxman

Although both early and late approaches can work, we’ve seen one approach that’s especially effective. That’s to invite key people on board at the outset, not inviting them to your introductory steering committee meeting, but as soon after that as possible—once you feel comfortable in the capabilities your approach will provide.

Simon Terry, former CEO of HICAPS, a healthcare-focused division of National Australian Bank (NAB), recalls almost immediately going to meet with the general manager of the bank’s tech security team. He had to make sure that any cloud-based collaborative software he wanted to use would be on the company’s whitelist. If it were put onto the blacklist, it would in effect be unreachable by people in the organization. He asked what would be the biggest issue the tech security team would have. They said publishing identifiable customer information. If there’s customer information going across the network and out of the network to the cloud, there will be a problem. Terry knew that had to be priority #1. No customer information could be within the online community.

Then he asked the GM, “What are you trying to achieve?” He needed everyone in the organization to understand the company’s Internet usage policy and how to prevent phishing, practices that applied to everyone at NAB. “What if we explain to everyone joining the social network that they need to first read through the Internet usage policy and that there would be forums to talk about ways for people to ensure they were both abiding by the policies and coming up with even better ways to work?” The security team thought this was a great idea, knowing that it would put something important (and previously unattainable) to work, and improve tech security across the company. Before a technology was rolled out, the tech security team tested the system and reported it proved better than their penetration testing. What could have been an ongoing struggle, created a team of allies who were respected throughout the organization.

Terry’s team did this again and again, each time with different groups, refining their arguments and their strategic goals, showing what collaboration could help with, and drawing new groups in. They chose to talk with their lawyers last, and found little argument. The legal team could see the benefits of a thriving community and wanted to create one for themselves, too.

Identify Quick-Win Opportunities

Every organization has people who are more likely to benefit quickly than others. That’s where you should begin. Identify what developers call “use cases”—the ways and means people will use these new approaches to clearly articulate who and how. Some use cases could be specific to individual groups (for example, project team collaboration), while others should be company wide (for example, cross-silo discussions).

Their purpose is to catalyze rapid, even if low-impact, results. Of course, if you can identify a use case where success would change something in the organization dramatically, these instance would be a powerful signal you’re moving in the right direction and others would want to join in. Just be careful your reach doesn’t exceed your grasp. A spectacular failure would be as memorable as a wild success.

Company-wide use cases deliver broad exposure within your company, while group-specific use cases can generate deep business value. Here are some we’ve found deliver the greatest, and quickest, value in organizations:

New Hire Onboarding

Provide new hires a small corner of your intranet full of pointers to information they need to help themselves get started. Not just paperwork to fill out from HR, but where the best places are to get lunch in the area, or what the best way is to let recruiting know you have a friend who would be a great fit, too. If you don’t have a social network already in the organization, add to this space a way for other employees to contribute their favorite suggestions and to make the new people welcome with information they wish they had when they’d just started.

Research shows that in strong culture companies it usually takes three to five years for newcomers to become influential in networks and replicate the connectivity of successful people in that organization. This timeframe has been dramatically shortened by organizations that have developed processes to help newcomers more rapidly integrate and replicate the networks of high performers.⁸

Photo Collections

Does your marketing department spend big bucks on contracts with stock photo services? Sponsor a photo contest using a photo-sharing tool where employees can upload their personal photos that showcase the types of images you often need. Write up a simple sharing agreement, explaining you’ll credit them for the photo, and launch with a company-wide contest for the best photos across the globe. Let your employees offer their best and ask them to help you determine which resonate most with people to gauge what prospective customers will also enjoy.

Employee Suggestion Box and Ideation Space

Launch a public conversation by asking, “What should be done to make this a great place to work?” Host this on an intranet site if you don’t have a social network, or put it on a giant bulletin board in the cafeteria. Move it online as soon as you can, helping people get in the habit of both making suggestions and offering help to address the request themselves alongside leaders also committed to the cause.

Tweet Through Class

Encourage participants in training courses to tweet with one another, to the instructor, and to the larger world across Twitter to ask big questions, seek more updated information, and garner stories of how various approaches have worked in other organizations. Begin with a hashtag and a list of everyone’s Twitter ID in the class, give a quick introduction to TweetChats, and start at the first class break. You’ll get immediate interest from people realizing this isn’t learning as usual, and you’ll get the larger insights from people everywhere.

Remember: social technology is not just to promote but mainly to connect. Be personal.
—Benjamin McCall

You might be surprised by what takes off and what doesn’t, so approach this in a spirit of experimentation and discovery, allowing it to happen dynamically and by asking yourself if there are insights that can be applied to other projects along the way.

Initiate, Seed, and Spur on Activity

Eventually it will be time to get your social tools up and running. You’ll likely accomplish this through a combination of the vendor you’re purchasing tools from and your IT department, who will also shoulder responsibility for ensuring these tools integrate with your current systems and can be kept up and running.

Once this has been done, your first order of business will be to figure out how to turn the social implementation into a social learning implementation. Here are some suggestions we believe will help ensure your success.

Inventory the tools already used inside your organization. Does a team in customer service use Yammer and Lync, Huddle, or even a Google group? Talk to someone using these systems and ask what they wish it could do that it doesn’t do already. Would they be interested in making it company wide? What are people learning there? What more could they learn or share if changes were made?

Ask people what they use to get their work done that’s not sanctioned (or at least provided) by the organization. Are there Facebook or LinkedIn groups being used between departments? Did you find someone else in your company looking for similar data through your personal Twitter accounts? And what about the learning as a result of this? Consider “seeding” content from leaders and others who are interesting to the organization. Also, look beyond content knowledge. What decisions can be made faster? Which people are rising to the occasion by introducing new practices?

To benefit from the open and real-time nature of social tools, embed tutorials and tips directly into your social space. Establish “rules of engagement” and highlight examples of how people use the space to align with your organization’s goals.

Social learning is the team sport of informal learning.
—Kelly Garber

Akamai has created a robust set of tutorials, best-practice guides, and 101 introductory modules that serve as a starting point to help employees feel comfortable with engaging. They’ve also included social media awareness and smart practices in their new-hire training so employees are aware of the guidance from the outset.

One of the first reactions of many people is to ask, “What’s in here?” You can answer that question simply and effectively by building a lobby area for your social space. This public entryway can serve as a place to share openly by default and a “one-stop shop” where new entrants can branch off into other, more specialized areas. If you were in a college or a student union or a community center, this would be the area you start out in, without the disoriented feeling you’d have if you went in directly to the break room or swimming pool. The lobby should be accessible to everyone in your organization and should host most, if not all, of the following elements:

• Announcements

• What’s new

• Knowledgebase

• Discussion forum

• Q&A and FAQs

• Rules of engagement

• Group/team lists

• How-tos

• New-hire onboarding

• Standard collateral

• Links to other workspaces you’ve built or plan to build

• Links to where to get help.

Populate these sections with content people will appreciate finding. This should be content colleagues already have, in the form of existing emails, documents, or personal knowledge easily available—which aren’t circulating already and that people will see value in right away. Spend time also seeding conversations on topics that will attract more people. You’re aiming to get people saying to one another things like, “Ooh, did you see that conversation in the online community? I hope you’ll contribute what you told me about last week.” Create conversations around the topics everyone is talking about right now as well as a few specialty areas that will remind others there’s value in addressing both the broad and the deep.

Here are a few fun and novel ways to bring newcomers in and encourage them to engage:

Dangle an Information Carrot

At an electronics company in Asia, the social learning leader stopped writing full emails. Instead, he began with headlines like, “Report Now Available on Social Progress.” In the body of his email he’d write, “We’re thrilled to report we’ve made huge strides with our social platform. Within the month of October, we had a 15 percent increase….” And then include a link in the email to where he’d written the rest of the post online. Everyone wanted to see the results and clicked on the link, finding themselves in an online community where, after they read his post, they saw other valuable content they wanted to read, too. Within a few minutes, they understood why the space was growing quickly, and they wanted to be a part of it.

Social is a marathon: go slow to be fast, run your own race, be willing to redefine success.
—Gina Minks

Develop Treasure Hunts

When a media giant’s board welcomed a half-dozen new directors, the personnel chairman created a treasure hunt to help acquaint them with the organization, fellow board members, and the local area. Three teams of four received hastily drawn learning-treasure maps before a self-guided tour of the corporate campus, a local shopping area, and a park. As they came across each clue identifying a person, place or thing, they used tablets, cell phones, texts, and cameras to capture what they found. Two teams even collaborated to find a missing clue. By the end of the day, they felt more connected and knowledgeable than with their participation on any other board. Why not try the same approach with new hires or business partners in town for a long meeting?

Turn Out-of-Office Messages Into FAQs

Chris Crummey, worldwide executive director of engagement and evangelism for social business at IBM, uses the out-of-office message in his email system as an opportunity to redirect the attention of people contacting him. The message says, in effect:

I’m out of the office and you’ve probably asked me this question before. Rather than wait until I’m back at my desk, consider doing the following:

1. Look through old emails to see how I answered the question last time.

2. Go to my online profile to see a list of frequently asked questions with links, including presentations and articles on how I’ve answered these questions in the past. [He includes a link to his profile.]

3. Search on my name in the company social network to find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of links to every topic I’ve ever worked on, with supporting information on how you can take action on your own.

4. Post the question on my wall so that others in my network can answer it for you while I’m away.

5. Ask your network if they have additional ways to solve your problem, discovering your network’s breadth and depth.

I’ll be back next week.⁹

Provide Ways for Lurkers to Contribute

Not everyone feels comfortable commenting online at first—and some will never be ready. The silent majority who rarely make the time to post can still gain tremendous value from the breadth of the organization they can glimpse online. They can learn from those who are participating more actively. In communities with tools that automatically recommend content based on what others read, lurkers become contributors without even having to chime in.

To engage people who wouldn’t naturally share publicly, have at least one group that doesn’t require public action in order for someone to get value from it. For example, while serving as Tyco’s community manager Phoebe Venkat started a public corporate news group. The majority of people who joined the group simply read the articles. They didn’t have to “like” or reply to feel part of something important. She found that the lurkers sometimes became active participants, but she realized it was more helpful for them to promote their experience to others who may have been wary like them. She says, “Keep in mind that lurkers may be getting a lot of value out of their experience, too.”

Listen Intently

You will not convince anyone to join you in this social adventure by ignoring or dismissing critics. By listening, you may find opportunities for improvements, further exploration, or even education on misinformation or lack of knowledge or understanding. If you can anticipate and think of a response to some of the objections ahead of time, you may be able to keep the conversation on point, and it will help you to illustrate the benefits for that group with meaningful examples and case studies.

Many organizations now even create groups expressly for critics. Rather than people complaining just anywhere, they can huddle up. Just be sure to have a few people check in periodically to calm the flames before they get too high, by answering questions, diplomatically taking matters offline, or alerting the right people to make fixes when the situation warrants it.

Social media isn’t enforcing old ways, rather enabling new ways.
—Jane Hart

In a similar way, one of the most effective techniques we’ve seen for culture change is to create a group all about rumors: From “Is there a merger on the horizon?” to whispers that headquarters may move to another state, this is the place for people to talk about what they’ve heard. What’s unique with this approach is that it’s more than water- cooler gossip. Organizations who use this approach make a commitment to answer all speculation with honest information. Rather than people wasting time wondering, they know there is one central place to learn what’s really happening. Anecdotally, we’ve also seen that people who had no interest in joining the conversation online are drawn to a place full of rumors. Once they’re there, they often find out that the online space provides value they’d never before considered.

Encourage Champions

Ready to start reaching out to other departments and groups? Take time to identify local champions and ambassadors who can share their enthusiasm in hands-on ways that motivate others to join in. Focus on those who are already on board. They’ll want to help you. They will look forward to helping their group. They just may not know how. Sit with them or connect online to explain what they can do.

Some people will naturally become advocates of social initiatives in your organization. Welcome these people and make it easy for them to share their knowledge, experiences, and expertise with others.

“Keep in mind that lurkers may be getting a lot of value out of their experience, too.”

—Phoebe Venkat

The online community at EMC, EMC|ONE, launched with a voluntary mentor program that encouraged people to add their names to a list of people whom anyone could contact for assistance, advice, or brainstorming. Champions emerged from all parts of the organization, with the diversity of experience to share what worked and what didn’t in different parts of the company as well as with customers, partners, and the larger ecosystem the organization serves.

When you introduce social tools into your organization, you are not simply introducing a new piece of technology; you are also ushering in a new way of working. That’s going to require some internal evangelizing, and you’re going to need some help from colleagues who are the first ones to get it. These are your early adopters, and they will play a crucial role in the success of your effort.

It may take some looking to find those early adopters. Either publicly or privately, you will need to recruit them. To do that, you’ll need to show off the technology. Even more importantly, you’ll need to provide answers to the following questions:

• Why are we bringing this technology in?

• How will we use it?

• Why is it better than what we’re doing now?

• What value will it deliver, and how will we realize it?

These are fundamental questions we recommend you address at in-person interactions with your colleagues, rather than relying exclusively on emails, posters, or other mass-marketing techniques. Ideally, these interactions are done face-to-face, but live screen sharing presentations may be more pragmatic for distributed groups.

I’m working on continuously improving my social ground game, learning out loud.
—Aaron Silvers

Time is tight, and you will need to focus your initial efforts on groups that have the greatest likelihood of embracing social learning. So where should you start? The strongest early adopter candidates are groups with the following characteristics:

• There’s at least one energetic and enthusiastic local champion inside the group who will encourage participation.

• Group members who are frustrated due to their inability to access updated information from their colleagues.

• They’re geographically distributed because they’re in global teams or distributed divisions.

• They’re technology friendly and likely comfortable with the changes new systems can go through before they get established. This could be IT or media departments, for instance.

• They’re innovation oriented, for instance, innovation centers or new product developers.

• They’re engaged in project based work like R&D teams.

• They’re new to the organization, so they don’t have established routines of how things are done.

Of all these characteristics, the strength of a local champion should be your top priority. As a core implementer—especially within a large organization—you cannot be everywhere at once. Time and again, we have seen how an enthusiastic and energetic individual can make an enormous difference. These local champions can come from any role, junior or senior. They need not have technology expertise, but it is very important they have personal credibility and daily engagement within the group they champion. They must also be willing to spend real time—up to 15 to 25 percent of their time for two to three months—to help you get their groups focused and learning.

Differentiate Benefits

You can’t sell the same value proposition to every group. What works for telemarketing is not likely to work for programming. Take time to understand the group you’re talking to and adapt the message, making it relevant to them. Don’t just say social learning is great. Tell people how it benefits them, how it can broaden their unique networks and enable them to do new things. Tailoring your message to your audience is at the heart of enabling them to see value in the new tools and the new ways of working being proposed.

Keep in mind the benefits you will see are not confined to those directly affecting business processes. There are many benefits available to those who participate that are more subtle, yet no less important to the long-term success of your organization.

As you move away from the push of information to the pull of learning, you will liberate creative powers in people, helping them to succeed in a fast-changing environment. Making it easy for them to inquire and announce activities and projects, both professional and personal, creates an environment where people are not afraid to fail, emboldening them to ask the really hard questions. You also begin to get answers you never would have found otherwise.

Research is quite clear about this: The more engaged people are, the more effectively they learn.¹⁰ In other words, the more questions they ask, the more they care and believe what they have to say matters, and the stronger their learning process becomes. Social learning is about making it easier for people to find both their questions and their voice.

Take, for example, Ben Brooks, a young man in an old profession. He worked for a large global insurance company—a company that insures other businesses that face complex risks around the world like cyber-security threats or political instability in emerging markets.

To help turn around the firm and grow its sales, he needed a way to interject modern practices and what he calls “sexy approaches” into a business that was flat-out risk averse.

Share is the new save.
—Jane Bozarth

When C-suite executives at the firm challenged him to train and educate the very experienced employee base, he jumped at the chance to up his game. The firm had amazing employees and provided white-glove service to their elite clients. Yet it had no way for employees to share or showcase their knowledge outside of their narrow product silos. And when it came to learning, the firm leaned on outside trainers to educate their deeply experienced employees, which didn’t make much sense to Brooks.

He conceptualized an approach for staff to share knowledge across silos in an effort to increase share-of-wallet of clients. But before rolling out a way for people to work collaboratively across the organization, he needed buy-in from the company’s legal team.

He began simply enough. He described to the lawyers an initiative that would bring social media tools to the company’s workforce, for internal use, and would train them on how to use these tools effectively. He then asked for the lawyers’ thoughts. They rattled off the risks involved and why they had apprehensions. They covered important points and conveyed thoroughly why they were unlikely to support his plan.

Brooks then broke out each of the risks they laid out, at an even more granular level, and showed them unrelated things that they were lumping together.

They said, “People will post inappropriate comments.”

Brooks asked, “Is our view that colleagues are bad people? If that’s so, shouldn’t we be taking action now, to weed out the rotten apples if you think we have some? Or instead, should we assume great behavior from our colleagues?”

“People will make inaccurate comments.”

Brooks asked, “Which is more dangerous, that they post something to their colleagues that’s inaccurate or that they believe and repeat something that’s wrong without them or us knowing? What are we doing now to ensure all the information in our organization that’s shared is right? We reduce our risk by having greater visibility across our 400 offices in real time.”

“Is our view that colleagues are bad people? Shouldn’t we assume great behavior?”

—Ben Brooks

He went on, intentionally showing value and necessity. He asked, “If we want to expand our business, would it even be possible for just the marketing and communications department to share information? We need our thousands of sales people, who are the ones who actually speak to our customers and know our business, to be talking with one another.”

Rather than come across as a freewheeling innovator, he showed them how in comparison to the way people were currently working that using social media would actually help de-risk the firm.

Brooks, now a business coach, points out that it’s natural for people to compare new opportunities with previous experiences, as if they’re looking into a rear-view mirror. By doing that, they can convince themselves they understand what’s being introduced and how it fits into the lexicon they know. In some ways, it’s a natural defense mechanism for feeling equipped, comfortable, and looking smart, even when we’re in new terrain. “It’s incredibly important to consider how you define things, and how you frame them so people can make the leaps with you rather than tattoo old thinking onto the organizational brain. That doesn’t mean to create a whole new vocabulary, mumbo jumbo that makes you sound smart and those to whom you’re appealing to feel dumb. Really think about what you’re trying to get accomplished and put it into the vernacular people you’re appealing to will understand.” 

REPUTATION, TRUST, and SOCIAL CAPITAL are becoming the true currency in the workplace.
—Tricia Ransom

There’s more upside than anyone would recognize if you only look at the downside. In insurance terms, Brooks showed the risk/reward ratio. When they could look at the two in tandem, they could see both the potential downside and desired upside. This shifted the conversation from speculating on potential risks to a business-based analysis of total potential risk exposure in relation to the overall benefit of the change. When he compared the risks, most of which he had plans to mitigate, to the upside of revenue growth that would move the stock price, it was a no-brainer. He had differentiated his message.

Few people agree to new things they don’t understand or see value in themselves. People you work with may already see benefit to working in a social way but don’t know how to proceed. By explaining how working in a social way serves their interests, you might open the door to getting started.

A corporate study from the Society for New Communication Research, called the “Tribalization of Business,” found that the greatest obstacles to making a community work were not about technology or getting funding, but about getting people involved in the community (51 percent), finding enough time to manage the community (45 percent), and attracting people to the community (34 percent).¹¹ Management was not cited as an obstacle. Just 9 percent of the respondents said that their management was unwilling to share with community members or support the initiative.

Lois Kelly, co-author of Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within, managing partner at Foghound, and one of the Tribalization report researchers, pointed out that a common fear—losing control—“may not be as big an issue as [people] think. The bigger challenge is focusing the community around a purpose that people want to contribute to and be involved with—and devoting the right resources to promote and support the community.”

Establish Guidelines and Road Rules

Phoebe Venkat, who was at Tyco and is now director of community engagement at salesforce.com, says in her experience the best policies are like “bumpers, guiding, helping, connecting, leading, driving, but not dictating. They establish the rules of the road.”

“At first I wrote our social media policy,” says Simon Terry. “Then the champions in our community told me I’d missed the mark. They used a wiki to write up a policy that was focused more on what people could do and less on what people couldn’t do.”

They helped Terry realize that he could mandate a tighter policy or enable a daily conversation about how to make good decisions. At times there were raging discussions about how stuff in their business works; at other times there were lingering and provocative exchanges about helping one another ensure confidentiality and how their actions provided greater support to their clients.

Because people in the community created the guidelines themselves, they talked to people joining the social network about them, using them as educational materials, rather than the fine print that could get them in trouble. When topics came up that either hadn’t been addressed in the guidelines or where people could see there was a better way to work, they’d work together online to revise the guidelines, applying what Terry describes as, “fitness to purpose.” Overall, they tried to maintain policies that recognized that social collaboration was nothing special, it was just another way people worked in the organization. Normal policy and behaviors should apply.

Organizations often start with a long, heavy-handed policy restricting the use of social media, then put in place simple rules stating when people should use which tool to communicate, create, or share specific types of information. It’s important to make it easy for people to understand which data and content are appropriate for what use without being so prescriptive as to inhibit creativity. Then, when people can see what others share, they will self-monitor and begin to see how to thoughtfully monitor one another.

Clark Quinn, author of Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age and an engaged learning consultant, captures the essence of good guidelines this way, “The best social media policies are only slightly less terse and irreverent than ‘don’t be an idiot.’”¹² Well said.

We’ve included examples of several very good governance policies in the Appendix for your reference.

Serve as a Positive, Visible Example

The best way to help is by modeling the behavior you want to instill across the company—in other words, by using social tools themselves. When the organization sees its leadership “walking the walk” and not merely “talking the talk,” it sends a powerful message that the new process is real. If you want a culture that takes more (calculated) risks, you can’t convince people that it’s OK. You must show them.

Trisha Liu believes in the Golden Rule of Community Design: Do unto participants as you would do unto yourself—and work toward ensuring senior leaders are doing it, too. Any action that you want people to take, like filling out their profile or posting a question, ask yourself, “Would I do this? Would the CEO? If not, why not? If yes, why? Write down all your answers. These become your training materials and objection handling guides.”

Executive participation can be one of the most powerful drivers for adopting social approaches, when it’s done in smart ways.

Laurie Ledford, chief human resources officer at Marsh & McLennan Companies, walked through the halls of her organization, taking candid photos of employees (with their permission) to populate their profiles and give the network a personal touch. Many of the employees didn’t have a photo they really liked or didn’t realize it was important, so they’d left the photo field blank. Ledford’s enthusiasm and playful spirit as she snapped photos showed both her commitment to the organization’s social network and her personal stake in helping to make it succeed.

While she knew adoption wouldn’t grow through executive mandate, seeing her active participation in other people’s success contributed to the culture she aimed to foster.¹³

Our experience is that when executive sponsors simply tell their organizations to use social software, adoption is short lived. We have even seen cases where heavy-handed, top-down directives hindered the success of grassroots adoption campaigns.

A community is like a shark. To live it must keep moving. If it stops moving it dies or becomes a group.
—Kelly Smith

What’s most important is active participation from influence leaders. Sometimes those are executives, other times those are leaders because of their insights and enthusiasm, not by position.

Research shows that leaders can speed adoption of change by 20 to 25 percent by working through opinion leaders to facilitate uptake of initiatives such as formal restructurings, cultural change programs, deployment of technology, or adoption of new work practices. Network analytics help identify both critical change agents and points of resistance that can derail change invisibly.¹⁴

“It’s incredibly important to consider how you define things, and how you frame them so people can make the leaps with you rather than tattoo old thinking onto the organizational brain.”

—Ben Brooks

Typically, leadership values transparency and the ability to drill-down to understand what people are working on, as well as to see the underlying assumptions. When leaders occasionally monitor open collaboration and perhaps bring attention to valuable contributions of others, contribution tends to increase across the board.

When you see you’re getting traction across the organization, that’s the right time to recruit other executives who will do their work in social tools and further build momentum to the larger initiative. Here are some of the most effective things an executive sponsor can do:

• Use social tools to replace the monthly status cycle by encouraging everyone to use them to report on their activities and then regularly monitoring their progress.

• Use status updates to tell the company what you’re doing and to seek input from everyone who might have something valuable to say. This can prove especially powerful when issues that will affect everyone need to be understood and weighed.

• Provide opportunities to answer questions posed by anyone within the organization.

• Post critical information, such as meeting agendas, in a shared workspace, instead of emailing them, and encourage the use of shared calendars.

• Blog internally on the social platform.

• Start a shared workspace for the executive team so the full leadership team has an opportunity to directly realize the value of your implementation.

• Post group- or company-wide announcements in the social space.

• Comment on workspace pages with observations and follow-up questions.

You may need to invest extra time with executives to mentor them personally. By modeling the behavior expected of everyone in the organization, they can rapidly accelerate your organization’s rate of adoption.

Measure Things That Matter

You’ve built it. Are people showing up? Are people learning from one another and affecting the problems you set out to overcome when you began? Monitoring use and practice delivers insights into how your organization is using social tools. With a little additional effort, it can also help you understand if it’s being used for learning, too. Focusing on change will also help you gauge the impact you’re having. Most importantly, it will enable you to build on your successes and identify initiatives that need your help.

Social learning can’t be enforced by leadership, but it does need leadership endorsement & participation.
—Kay Chappell Wood

Social networking or online community workspaces provide administrative capabilities to generate weekly and monthly usage reports. Look at these reports weekly and ask yourself a few diagnostic questions that will help focus your time on where it can make the greatest difference. As your implementation progresses, you will likely find interest in different metrics to gauge the health of your organization’s use. Here are a few early indicators you should monitor.

“The best social media policies are only slightly less terse and irreverent than ‘don’t be an idiot.’”

—Clark Quinn

How Is Overall Adoption Going?

Overall adoption is the most basic high-level snapshot of impact. While there is no universal standard for healthy adoption, here are some useful benchmarks:

• If at least 25 percent of your organization visits monthly, you’re starting to have significant impact.

• If at least 50 percent of your organization visits monthly, social tools are becoming an ingrained part of how you do business.

• If you’re using your social implementation as an intranet or other content publishing platform, you should see a relatively low rate of contribution (for example, 5 to 10 percent of unique visitors are also contributors).

• If you’re using it for project team collaboration or other interactive work, you should see a higher rate of contribution (for example, 25 to 75 percent of unique visitors are also contributors).

• You can expect a large percentage of people will log on to the system but will seldom participate. Rather, they will lurk. This isn’t a bad thing. Lurkers read and learn; not everyone needs to be an active participant in order to receive value from the overall experience of your organization.

Keep in mind that these numbers may vary significantly by department, group, or use. Also remember that trends are as important, if not more important, than absolute numbers.

Are There Strong Pockets of Adoption?

You should leverage your strongest pockets of adoption to spread the value across your company. Reach out to your most active participants in heavily used workspaces. Ask them:

• How are you using these social tools?

• What business value are they generating for you?

• What have you done to integrate them into the daily flow of your group’s work?

• Where else in the company can you see a valuable role for social tools?

• What are you learning?

• What else would you like to learn—and what would be helpful along the way?

In particular, when you collect anecdotes of generated value, share them publicly and refer to them as you enhance the business case of your social implementation. Encourage the people you talk with to share their stories, too. Showcasing success from more than one perspective strengthens your efforts and encourages others to join in.

Are There Places Where Adoption Is Low or Declining?

You can proactively help workspaces or groups that are struggling. Reach out to them to understand why adoption is low or declining. Specifically, ask them:

• Is there a clear and compelling business objective for your use of social tools?

• Have they invited in everyone required to make your use successful?

• Is the experience attractive and compelling?

• Do they use the social tools daily, posting meeting notes, to-do lists, documentation, FAQs, and pictures for others to see?

Trust People and Share, Share, Share

Although the use of social tools grows each day, we still often hear, “We limit what we offer to keep people from playing all day.” Somehow it’s assumed the software can cause misbehavior.

Rather than agreeing, turn the assumption around. Gently remind such doubters that if people are wasting time, there is a management and talent-vetting problem, not a social learning problem. Some people will always find ways to waste time.

Ben Brooks compares collaborative platforms to metal detectors. “In addition to helping you find the jerks more quickly, you can find the people who are hidden gems you didn’t know before. The kind of emergent talent that’s buried under layers of management or in smaller offices.”

Social approaches to work also bring to light intangibles that haven’t found a way to show up yet on the balance sheet. You “illuminate all sorts of assets your staff has that you didn’t realize they had,” says Brooks, “their connections, their experiences beyond their roles, their passions, and their willingness to take the firm to the next level. This is the organizational value you can’t see in the two-dimensional structured data of an HRIS system.”

Once learning is traversing around and across groups, encourage repeated participation and entice people who are more reluctant to step in. One of the most effective ways to do this is to route more and more of the organization’s work through the social space. Remind everyone why this is being done and show them how it works.

Present at regular team meetings, first in one group, then in another, until you’ve moved across your organization. This enables each group to talk and brainstorm about the specific ways they will use social tools, and ask questions they may have. As you engage with each group, aim to:

• spur on excitement about the power of social software to improve the way the company runs and how each person learns.

• connect social learning with the larger objectives of each group and work with them to figure out additional ways they can replace their boring tasks with more modern (and fun) ways to work.

• identify several potential champions within each group who can energize further participation.

Once you have a few successful groups up and running, it’s time to scale up your success to the rest of your organization. Here are some of the most effective ways to let the rest of the company know what you’re up to:

Social isn’t something you do; it’s something you become.
—Mark Oehlert

• Expand your road show. Talk to more groups once you have had more practice and you can point to internal success stories.

• Harness your company’s internal communications group. Use your corporate communications vehicles, like newsletters and internal video channels, to spotlight early adopters.

• Integrate social tools with other websites your company uses, and with social tools from your intranet, knowledge management system, document management system, and others. Cross-link, build custom dashboard widgets, or integrate curated lists wherever people can benefit from them.

• Present to senior leadership, who can help turbocharge your efforts. When you’re really proud of what your early adopters have done, share it and ask for active participation from the highest levels in your organization. Executives also benefit from learning fast.

• Encourage those enjoying success to share it from their perspective. This works particularly well if they were reluctant in the beginning and are now advocates.

By going public with your early success, you will start expanding beyond early adopters to the rest of the organization. Then you can repeat the process with more and more groups. Each follow-up group will have your early adopters as a template and model for how to proceed.

“If you post or do something that’s inappropriate, you’ll hear about it from the people around you before HR.”

—Lee Burbage

As implementation and use of your platform grows, and you begin analyzing change, you will want to start finding out how the people who are using the system interact with other organizations, including suppliers, customers, and your local community.

Much of what you learn may not be immediately useful. As time goes by you’re going to want to reach out to your customers and suppliers, the former so you can respond to problems and issues quickly and in a transparent way, and the latter so you can improve on your supply chain and your ability to iterate your systems more effectively.

Most organizations also wish to be good corporate citizens and, as a consequence, they make efforts to be involved in community activities. Frequently, these activities are limited to merely holding fund-raising events and donating money to a local charity or helping organization. As your organization and people build experience and gain expertise in social learning, you may find you can provide local organizations with more than just money. You may be able to share some of your knowledge of collaboration to help them be better as well.

You are embarking on a journey that will be rewarding and (dare we say…) fun. You are opening up your organization to a whole new way of working. You are bringing your colleagues together in dynamic and exciting ways that will reduce drudgework, make your company more productive, and strengthen your colleagues’ sense of community and connectedness. That’s exciting.

The best ideas come from the many thousands of people around the world who use social tools every day. Once you’re on your way, discuss the ideas, techniques, and resources in this book with your colleagues and please reach out to us and other people interested in these themes in our online community, where people post new ideas, questions, tips, practices, techniques, and more. Come join us at www.newsocialearning.com. We look forward to learning with you.