How To Set Up Learning By Sharing For Success
Five practical phases to build out high-impact learning groups in your organization.
In my previous letter, I shared the benefits of Learning by Sharing. These can be grouped into two main categories:
Social Capital
Knowledge Management
We saw that people interacting with people on a regular basis shortens the learning curve for new employees, improves response time to customers, reduces rework, spawns new ideas, and creates a sense of belonging.
Today I want to share five practical phases to build out high-impact learning groups in your organization.
How To Set Your Team Up To Learn By Sharing
Domain, Community, Practice
Let’s start at the highest level.
According to the pioneers of the concept of Communities of Practice, there are three key characteristics needed in groups established for learning:
The domain - there is a shared domain of interest among members. Members are committed to the domain and therefore develop a shared competence around it.
The community - members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. In other words, having the same job is not enough. People in the job need to interact and learn together.
The practice - this isn’t mere interest in a domain, members are practitioners. Members actively develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, and ways of addressing recurring problems (more on this in the section on Knowledge Management below).
Key Takeaway: organize people around a common domain either vertically (e.g. a function, department, or role) or horizontally (e.g. a level of management) and design ways for them to learn from each other and take action on what they’re learning.
Social Capital
In my last letter, we learned that social capital results in greater knowledge sharing, which in turn positively influences business outcomes.
I found this great journal article on social capital in the workplace. The researchers expressed social capital in three dimensions, which are helpful for us looking to recreate this magic in our companies.
The characteristics of the three dimensions are:
Structural - individuals must perceive themselves to be part of a network of connections to other people.
Relational - trust must be developed across these connections.
Cognitive - the members of the network must have a common interest.
Here are some key takeaways from looking at it through each of the three dimensions.
The Structural Dimension
Key Takeaway: create a database and clear channels to reduce the time and effort of finding information. Assign someone as a content manager to maintain this database to keep it fresh and relevant. Often these content managers also serve to connect people not only to the original author of a particular document but to others who might be able to provide insight on a particular problem.
The Relational Dimension
Key Takeaway: use face-to-face activities to help people identify others with similar interests and develop a sense of empathy around common challenges. Face-to-face activities also set the stage for people to establish norms for how they want to interact with each other, to establish a sense of reciprocity (returning favors with favors), and a sense of trust and belonging.
The Cognitive Dimension
Key Takeaway: the common interest in this dimension creates a common language for people. A common language makes it easier to access people and their knowledge. One of the best ways to do this is by sharing stories. As we’ve seen in previous letters, shared stories encode nuance and tacit knowledge in a way no documentation could ever hope to.
James Clear said it best:
"When researching strategies, emphasize patterns over stories. One person succeeding means nothing. 100 people succeeding is a signal. When explaining strategies, emphasize stories over patterns. People forget numbers and charts. Everyone remembers a great story."
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is a shift in perspective from seeing knowledge as an asset owned and maintained by an individual to an entire team. The focus of the team is to capture and improve the “company memory” – not only to solve specific customer issues, but also to improve organizational learning.
I’m a massive fan of the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) approach to this. They offer some helpful prompts for aligning with the four key principles of their approach:
Trust
Are you designing from a basis of trust... or mistrust?
Are you trusting people’s ability to make good judgments?
Are you giving them the information they need to make good judgments?
Create Value
Are you working in the context of the big picture: the desired long term outcome?
Demand Driven
Are you doing things just-in-time, in response to demand, and in the context of the customer’s experience?
Abundance
Are you promoting learning, collaboration, sharing, and improving?
The ultimate goal of KCS is to create findable, usable knowledge for a specific audience.
Key Takeaways: make all knowledge:
Findable: how does your approach to capturing, organizing and storing knowledge improve the audience's ability to find it?
Usable: how does your approach contribute to the usefulness of the knowledge? (Are you capturing who the author was for possible follow-up? Are you capturing the original question for better context?)
Types Of Activities
Next up, you need to be thinking about what people will be doing in these learning groups.
From the Communities of Practice paper I shared above, comes a helpful list of example activities:
Problem-solving - “Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck.”
Requests for information - “Where can I find the code to connect to the server?”
Seeking experience - “Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?”
Reusing assets - “I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client.”
Coordination and synergy - “Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk discounts?”
Building an argument - “How do people in other countries do this? Armed with this information it will be easier to convince my Ministry to make some changes.”
Growing confidence - “Before I do it, I’ll run it through my community first to see what they think.”
Discussing developments - “What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?”
Documenting projects - “We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all.”
Coordinating visits - “Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city.”
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps - “Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups should we connect with?”
Key Takeaway: the examples above have a possible real-world outcome. Mix and match in your design what you instruct groups to do, but always tie it to an action members can take in the real world that will move their work forward.
Myths and Misconceptions
Finally, it’s useful to look at some of the false beliefs the researchers discovered about Communities of Practice to see what we can learn.
Let’s bust some myths, shall we?
Always self-organizing - not true, communities need cultivation to ensure members get value for their time.
No leaders - decisions need to be made, and informal leaders (or stewards) will emerge to take charge of the group.
Always informal - not true, the more intentionally these are set up, the more strategic impact they can have on the business.
Only for sharing existing knowledge - no! When done well, members in these groups innovate and create for an organization.
Difficult to measure the impact - we dispel this one at Curious Lion by getting members to self-assess proficiency at varying stages of learning together.
Good facilitation is all it takes - false! Top leadership needs to place value and participate in these groups. Members need to view participation as a priority and see how their contributions are affecting the business.
Always harmonious - conflict-free learning groups are groupthink groups. Diversity of opinion is important. Differences need to be discussed.
There is a perfect technology - nope, in fact evaluating different tools is often an impediment to setting up and getting started. Sometimes all you need is a Zoom/Teams link and a wiki.
It’s all you need - learning groups do not replace project teams or other cross-functional networks in an organization. They do support them though.
There you have it. From the three high-level considerations of domain, community and practice, to the three dimensions of social capital, from the KCS principles and goals for knowledge management to the specific activities you can use in your learning groups, you have the makings of a process for designing and rolling out Learning By Sharing in your organization.
In my next letter, we’ll learn about the final ingredient to expand our Circle of Learning even further than we see below: Learning by Teaching.